Pick a column, any column

Choose any Nick Kristof column dealing with the humanitarian crises in Africa, and comment here. Mention the specific column and cite at least two of Kristof's phrases or sentences in your response.
Any questions? Just ask.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?match=any&query=Africa

Summer Reading

The other night at dinner my wife wondered aloud why anyone, myself included, would assign summer reading? I didn't have a prepared answer, except to say I thought some of the discussions that came out of this year's assignment had been productive. I also thought the two books worked well together, and there is always the fact that likely few if any students would have read either of these books had I not assigned them.
So now I want to hear from those who were required to read them. Tell me what you think about the idea of a summer assignment, and what you thought in particular about the two books in question.

How can readers have such diverse reactions to the same book? Is this a comment about the books or about the readers, and if it is about the readers what does this say about what we as readers bring to the process?

Once Upon A (Michigan) River

Margo Crane first enchanted readers in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s 2009 short story “Family Reunion.”
Meeting her again in Campbell’s novel “Once Upon A River” is an even larger treat. Margo, the Annie Oakley-wannabe heroine of this latest novel, has been compared to Huck Finn and Odysseus.
These comparisons, though, minimize the decency of the teenage Margo, who is not so much larger than life but rather as unadorned as life. A sharp shooting interloper and outsider in the clannish Murray family of Campbell’s fictional southern Michigan burg “Murrayville,” Margo’s yearnings for family and purpose personify the same fundamental longings recognized by everyone who has experienced family turmoil.
Cast adrift when her mother abandons her and by her father’s inability to understand her untamed impulses, Margo early on learns to fend for herself around the riverside home she shares with her father, just across the water from the Murrays. In part, Margo’s outsider status is sealed long before she is born, as her father, Bernard Crane, is “born the bastard son of Dorothy Crane and Old Man Murray during his bout of infidelity.”
When calamity soon visits, Margo discovers, “For the first time in a year, she was, horribly, part of the family.” The Murrays are expected to rally around the teen at this crucial moment, but she instead lights out along the Stark River in her teak rowboat “The River Rose,” given to her by her grandfather, Old Man Murray.
Campbell’s evocation of the elemental pull of the river on Margo’s burgeoning awareness is consistent as well as convincing. On the first night she spends at home without her father, “She smelled the river in every corner of the house, in every molecule of the air, in every pore of her own body.”
Margo next embarks on a series of sometimes heartbreaking but always heart-rending adventures, involving a cast of low brow characters like Brian and Paul, meth-making brothers who prowl the river for treasure, real or imagined, and Michael, whose river dog Cleo Margo renames “King,” because though a female, she stalks the river like a kingfisher.
Her journey’s purpose, ulimately, is to find her mother Luanne, whom Margo remembers as cocoa butter and white wine. Luanne left her husband and daughter, unable to cope with the closed nature of Murrayville. Rumored to be upstream, in Heart of Pines, Luanne becomes Margo’s destination.
Upstream or down, Margo pilots the banks of the Stark River as she navigates the edges of society. Unwilling to return to the stifling expectations of Murrayville, she instead journeys in and out of trouble, accompanied always by the .22 caliber Marlin rifle she appropriates from uncle Cal before leaving the family decay.
Eventually, in the emphysema-riddled Smoke, his dog Midnight, and his friend Fishbone, Margo finds both purpose and place, though she is no more settled than before, as Luanne remains in still uncharted waters.
“Once Upon A River” captivates as it startles, because Margo Cranes leaves in her wake a tale illustrating the confluence of calamity and connection.
Good Reading.

Alex McKnight Returns in Misery Bay.

Fictional sleuth Alex McKnight is back and his fans are pleased, but no more so than his creator, Michigan-born author Steve Hamilton.
Returning in his eighth novel, McKnight ventures west from his home base in Paradise, to ominously named Misery Bay, where he is asked to investigate the suicide of a college student, a young man who appeared to have it all, but who instead hangs himself from a large, lonely tree near the shores of Lake Superior.
After a five year hiatus that saw Hamilton publish a second stand-alone novel “The Lock Artist,” Hamilton decided McKnight’s return should have the reluctant hero veer west. “I knew he had never gone west in the U.P.,” Hamilton says. “I knew it was very different out that way; I knew he’d have to wander out that way some time and get in trouble.”
Hamilton knew the only way he could have McKnight find the mystery of the western U.P. was to travel there himself, so he drove the Seney Stretch along M-28, eventually landing in the tiny town of Toivola. When he saw the nearby sign for Misery Bay, Hamilton knew he had found the right spot. “It’s not even on the map, unless you have a really good map,” he says of the bay.
Absorbed in an environment he describes as “forlorn and forgotten, he began to imagine the details of his new project. “ Like any crime writer, I asked myself what’s the worst thing that could happen here,” before fixing on the new book’s entry point, the suicide of a promising young man. He says the location is perfect for Alex’s next adventure, “Because it’s such a lonely place and there’s this big tree overlooking the lake.” The tree figures prominently in the story.
As he has for all his Alex McKnight novels, Hamilton resurrects some other colorful characters, chief among them Jackie Connery, owner of the familiar Glasgow Inn in Paradise, the spot McKnight is likely to be sipping on a cold Molson while waiting for something to happen. Jackie is as taciturn as ever, opening the story by telling some unsuspecting snowmobiler in a pink suit to leave and never come back when the man tramples on the local affinity for Lake Superior.
The first major twist in the story comes when Roy Maven, another recurring character and chief of police in Sault Ste. Marie, calls on McKnight with the hope of enlisting the sleuth’s help. Turns out the dead boy’s father is an old colleague of Maven’s. “Theoretically they’ve always been on the same side, even though they knock heads sometimes, Hamilton says of the tension in the relationship between Maven and McKnight.
As the boy’s father struggles to make sense of the suicide, he turns to his old buddy Maven. “It’s like the ultimate heart-breaking mystery,” Hamilton says of the weight of the suicide. Of the questions surrounding what drove the young man to suicide, Hamilton believes, “It’s almost an impossible question to answer,” which necessarily becomes the novel’s purpose.
Enlisted because he might be more likely to get the boy’s college pals to open up, McKnight reluctantly, as always, agrees to give it a shot, expecting to find little useful information, eventually uncovering more than enough to unravel the details that resolve the case.
Hamilton believes Alex McKnight has evolved since the first novel in the series, the Edgar Award winning “A Cold Day In Paradise,” published in 2000. “He still blames himself for what happened,” Hamilton says, referring to the shooting death of his partner when McKnight was a Detroit police officer, a shooting that occurred 14 years earlier. “When you first meet him, it’s been a few years since all this stuff happened in Detroit and he’s hoping not to deal with it.”
Dealing with it is a major current in the novels. McKnight has moved north to forget, but he can’t. Surrounded by his past, both personal and professional, the retired cop finds he’s constantly being called upon by new friends to help.
Though Alex McKnight took a hiatus, Hamilton did not. Still working his day job at IBM, he also managed to keep writing, turning out stand-alone mysteries in “Night Work,” and “The Lock Artist,” both well received by critics and readers alike. “It’s strange to think of a fictional character as needing a break,” he says of McKnight, “but he really did.”
Hamilton also wanted to take a break from his fictional creation. “I never want it to get easy. You can tell when someone hasn’t burned a lot of calories on a middle book,” he continues, explaining he didn’t want readers to think of him this way.
He believes the experience of the stand-alone books has been helpful. “I hope I became a much better writer having gone through it.” He feels the break from the series was necessary. “That was all I knew, and I sort of had this idea ‘that you need a break or you’d be stuck.’”
Having returned to the series, Hamilton has plans for even more. “I can’t imagine ever not wanting to go back to Alex,” he says. “I’m working on the next book, and it’s Alex. I’m sure I’ll stay with him for the next two.”
About his absence from Michigan, Hamilton says the space is helpful to his writing about home. “If you’re in the minute details every day and you get to look back, you might miss something.” From the distance of his New York home, he believes, “I can look back and know what Michigan is. Without hesitation, Hamilton says, “I know for a fact I couldn’t have written these books if I hadn’t moved away and had a chance to look back.”
Steve Hamilton will be back in Michigan beginning July 12 with a stop in Montague. He will conclude his tour with a visit to the Mackinac Island Public Library on August 26. He will sign books in Traverse City at Horizon books on Tuesday, July 19 from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m.
For more details about his books and his book tour, visit authorstevehamilton.com

Bood, Bones, and Butter

The success of “Blood, Bones, and Butter” is that chef and restaurateur Gabrielle Hamilton turns her “inadvertent education (as) a reluctant chef” into a memoire as much about food as it is about family dynamics and cultural criticism. That she does this with metaphors concocted as carefully as her handmade salad dressings leaves a pleasant finish on the palate.
The owner of the New York’s trendy though classic Prune, Hamilton has written regularly about food in such magazines as “Bon Appetite” and “Food & Wine.” She has also been anthologized in “Best Food Writing.” Her University of Michigan writing degree does her well in her first book as week.
Raised in the Delaware River valley of New Jersey, Hamilton came up in a house full of older siblings, with an artist father and a French mother who navigated a six burner stove like a practiced dancer. Her mother cooked rustic fare. “She instilled in us nothing but a total and unconditional pleasure in food and eating,” Hamilton says.
The petite blonde cut her restaurant teeth waiting tables at local eatery “Mothers,” before moving to New York and the cultural weight of cowboy chic at the Lone Star Café. Here she learned “working her (expletive) tables,” meant pocketing cash meant for the cash register, then splitting it with the bartender.
Once she learned her lesson, Hamilton embarked on the 1980s odyssey of cocaine and sleeping late. The lesson also soon landed her in jail.
Both ahead of and behind her peers, she eventually enrolled at Hampshire College, intent on regaining some semblance of middle class expectations. Her history kept nagging, however, so Hamilton returned to New York and restaurant work.
Soon came gigs in commercial catering kitchens, where she met plenty of “ever-interchangeable warm (bodies) in a rented chef coat who knew not one thing about what a homemade mayonnaise might be.” The scale of such operations showed Hamilton that what often passed as good food was nothing more than quickly concocted combinations of second-rate ingredients, dressed up with clever presentations. The sheer quantity of the expectations demanded such shortcuts.
Next came a four summers long stint at a Berkshire summer camp, where Hamilton served baked chicken and tater tots by the pan-full, but also insisted on local produce and dairy.
Of her mother-in-law, Hamilton says her eighty-year-old Italian mother-in-law “cooks eggplant that satisfies like meat, grows her own olives, peels apricots from her own trees, and sun dries tomatoes to make her own tomato paste.”
Hamilton makes a fine meal of "Blood, Bones, and Butter."

In Which Brief Stories Are Told

Ferris State University English professor Phillip Sterling believes Northern Michigan is not easily categorized. Sterling, an accomplished poet, has recently published a collection of short stories, many of which take place in this area.
The prevailing narrative thread in his book of short stories, “In Which Brief Tales Are Told,” is the uncertainty between what is known and what is suspected. In each of the fifteen stories, narrators, some omniscient, some confined, unravel details that often leave as many questions as they answer.
Published as part of the Made In Michigan Series from Wayne State University Press, “In Which Brief Stories Are Told,” demonstrates Sterling’s poetic tendencies in prose narratives. Case in point is “The Small Bridge.” In the span of six pages, Will and his future/ former wife Joy move from an early encounter raking leaves to marriage, then onto divorce, all the while imagining their daughter Artemis, and how the failed relationship reveals their most intimate feelings.
The raking, “no more than stench of death and decay,” serves as an appropriate metaphor for their failed relationship, made only less so by the wonder of their daughter. Here, Sterling’s narrative veers to the heart of the matter, as we learn, “What should be said instead is how little they knew of each other at this point in the story.”
In “An Account in Her Name,” Sterling’s narrative approach is more traditional. A middle-aged woman returns to Northern Michigan to meet a banker about a savings account her long missing sister kept. In the unfurling of events, readers learn that the sister, a teenage lifeguard and swimming instructor at a public beach in Beulah, left a legacy of not only mystery but also insight
Edie, the lifeguard gone AWOL, worked hard at their father’s restaurant, a place he buys in order to move his family north, to escape the sinister possibilities of the city. His family is slow to buy into his dream, though Edie works hard to keep up appearances.
In the span of a summer, Edie disappears while returning North from her studies at Kalamazoo College, unleashing events that bring down the dreams of those around her, including her parents and her sister. When the sister, the story’s narrator, conducts her banking, however, the mystery is at once renewed and reduced.

How The West Was Won

Revision as history is a dicey business, so when he announces at the end of his new book, “Strange combinations of forgetting and remembrance followed the death of Crazy Horse,” Thomas Powers acknowledges the uncertainty in taking up any long known but little understood story.
“The Killing of Crazy Horse” is Powers’ attempt to explain the 1877 death of one of the most iconic Indians in all of American history. Throughout his investigation, Powers remains steadfast in his purpose not to cast blame but to unravel what has long been hinted at but never before now publicly proven.
That Crazy Horse held a special place of disgust in the white world is easily substantiated. Present in 1876 at the Little Big Horn river in Montana, the Oglala chief was largely seen as the cause of Custer’s last stand. With victory comes the right to tell the story, but with defeat comes the insistence on assigning blame. This blame, though nearly universal in the annals of the government’s explanations about what happened at that Montana outpost, is less clear in Powers’ retelling.
The larger context of the story, however, reaches back beyond this single battle, pointing fingers at a host of characters, both Indian and white, who, through circumstance or conspiracy, combined to find Crazy Horse at Nebraska’s Fort Robinson on the eve of his death in 1877.
Powers is careful to describe the results as “the killing,” though many might conclude or suggest it was murder. What has long been understood is Crazy Horse’s position in the Sioux society. He was a venerated chief, a “shirt wearer,” and a celebrated warrior. What he might not have been was any more responsible for Custer’s death than any of the other Sioux present at the fateful battle in 1876.
The flashpoint that led to the killing of the Oglala chief was undeniably the death of Custer. Powers, as have others, however, demonstrates how Custer and Major Marcus Reno likely erred in their maneuvers to surround and defeat the Indians. Indeed, Powers points out, how Reno faded from involvement when the battle flashed. “About Reno even the word cowardice was being used,” we learn.
Regardless the blame at Little Big Horn, the circumstances surrounding the death of Crazy Horse point to an amalgam of Indians and whites whipped to chaos and brutality not simply by the death of Custer, but by indecision, uncertainty, and cultural clashes that had boiled over once gold was discovered in the Black Hills of the Dakotas, traditional Oglala hunting grounds.
Implicated in this confusion of personalities is Little Big Man, once Crazy Horse’s friend, but at the end his adversary, as well as General George Crook, a veteran of the Civil War who always thought his successes overshadowed by those of Sherman and Sheridan.
Without the published accounts of the mixed blood scouts, those who interpreted between Indians and whites, this story might never have been recounted. The diaries of Billy Garnett and James Bordeaux are most compelling.
“The Killing of Crazy Horse” provides an insightful look at one of the most well known but little understood moments of American history.
Good Reading.

What Are We Fighting For?

As a precocious kid coming up in the 1970s, I was drawn to the editorial page of the morning newspaper, where I first discovered Gary Trudeau, with his irreverent but accurate portrayal of American narcissism in the form of “Doonesbury.”
Andrews McMeel Publishing has recently issued “40: A Doonesbury Retrospective,” a compendium of every strips published since the comic launched in 1970. Also included are brief chapters by Trudeau on his most significant characters, including Mike Doonesbury, Uncle Duke, Zonker Harris, and others.
At the beginning, Trudeau explains what the book is not. “It’s not about Watergate, gas lines, cardigans, Reagonomics, a thousand points of light, Monica, New Orleans, or even Dubya. None of that.” He is also sure readers will be “relieved” at this news.
Trudeau is confident readers are not interested in “decoding long-expired topical material.” He explains that the book is instead an attempt to show “how it felt to live through those years.” This coffee table sized read includes 13 percent of the 14,000 strips published.
His character’s and his comic strip’s history is all here, nonetheless. The strip began, as most regular readers will already know, while Trudeau was an undergraduate. His first character was B.D., inspired by a college pal. But when syndication came, he knew was necessary to expand his character pool, so soon after, between 1970 and 1974, came the additions of Mike Doonesbury, Mark Slackmeyer, Joanie Caucaus, and intrepid CNN newsman Roland Burton Hedley, Jr.
A quickly noticeable feature of the strip’s evolution is the development of the drawing style and coloration. The first few panels are black and white, the outlines suitably shaded, but less structured and less defined than those of later efforts.
That evolution is also evident in the character’s dialogue. Whereas Mike and B.D. are largely concerned at the outset with what college life might offer, whether there are enough girls to meet a mixers, or the power of campus protest, the acceleration into topics of national significance and lasting impact is remarkable for its historical significance.
Richard Nixon might not make an obvious appearance, but nonetheless, here are Mark, Mike, and B.D. handing out awards to “the men and women who made Watergate a reality.”
Just when it appears Trudeau and his imaginary friends might stay fixed on matters of national significance, however, they veer back toward the ordinary, such as when Mark’s father announces to his still sleeping son, “Yessir, tomorrow’s the first day of college and it’s time to shake down the old man for the upcoming semester.”
Trudeau's most iconic character, however, is Uncle Duke. Modeled on bombastic journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Duke is memorable, whether lambasting his CIA intern for launching a Predator drone, or praising his Samoan aide for mixing a pitcher of daquiris.
For a look back at who we are, check out "40: A Doonesbury Retrospective."
Good Reading.