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Nonfiction Views: No Ordinary Assignment, plus the week's new nonfiction and publishing news [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-25
The author’s note that opens No Ordinary Assignment, the new memoir by foreign correspondent by Jane Ferguson, states:
I wrote No Ordinary Assignment with one main purpose in mind: to answer with total honesty the question Why do you do this work? Really, why? I am asked this question often—most war reporters are—at public events, on panels, when speaking to people anywhere in the world, and always, always at dinner parties. There are neat answers, popular ones, about speaking truth to power and bearing witness. I am, as you will learn in these pages, wholeheartedly dedicated to human rights, truth, and helping the world understand itself in all its beauty and ugliness. But that’s not the whole story of why I made the choices I did in my life and why this particular work became so important to me.
She gets asked that question, of course, because she has spent so much of her life in dangerous places and situations from Yemen to Somalia to Afghanistan, and most people are totally confounded that anyone—especially a woman!-- would choose to do so. Personally, I would never ask that question. I think it’s an incredible way to live, one I much admire and envy (though I have dabbled in a few adventurous journalistic trips in South America in the past.)
If anything, I feel a little ashamed that I sometimes have the opposite feeling. For example, one of my favorite books is Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, by Deborah Copaken, another memoir of a female photojournalist’s experiences in some hot warzones. I confess to feeling disappointed when her subsequent books were a volume of self-help advice and then a book of parenting advice, of all things. How could that gutsy individual who documented some of the most dangerous places on Earth settle down into such a prosaic existence, I couldn’t help but think. I know that’s totally unfair. People’s lives contain many stages and goals, but I just couldn’t help feeling a wee bit...betrayed, perhaps? Frightened by normalcy? Her most recent book, last year’s Ladyparts: A Memoir, is, however, another brave work of journalism, documenting her harrowing journey through the medical system and social support system of a misogynist US society. (It comes out in paperback October 24th.)
I got a similar surge of that feeling when reading the obituary in The New York Times of Sally Kempton, a fierce feminist journalist in the late 1960s and early1970s who became a disciple of Swami Muktananda and pretty much withdrew into following him, and later into setting up her own classes on meditation. Again, I just couldn’t help thinking, aww, what happened to that ferocious, politically engaged person? (The link to the Times should be free for all to read.)
Well, after that long sidetrack, back to No Ordinary Assignment.
So, yes, I love this book as well. The set pieces in danger zones keep you on edge. The details she offers of her personal history may help those agog questioners to understand how she came to this career choice. She grew up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, part of the Ulster Scots Protestant community, and tells of her Uncle Desmond, who walked with a limp. Her parents would act annoyed when she asked about it, and simply tell her he had once been kicked by a cow. It wasn’t until she was in her twenties that she learned the truth: a gunman from an IRA splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army, had opened fire on him. His mother was also hit, and died five weeks later, and an eight year old cousin was also wounded.
But though her family tried to shield her from some of the stories, she was after all living there in the midst of violence. The local police station was bombed every few year, rattling the windows. Her school was a mere 50 yards from the police station, and when she was six years old she and her classmates ran to the window to watch a mortar attack on the building, until their teacher yelled art them to get away from the window. Six years later, during summer vacation, the school was damaged, and a teacher injured, by a car bomb attack against the station.
It never occurred to me to ask why they didn’t move the school away from the police station. Children accept everything around them as perfectly normal, even the trappings of war. Years later I would wander through makeshift refugee camps on the Lebanon-Syria border, settlements filled with Syrian children smiling and laughing, playing in the trash, covered in mud. As much as they had experienced appalling trauma, there was a duality to their normalization of everything. A pure acceptance: No one knows where Dad is, and we all left home to come here and live in this tent. Children will say such things with a smile. My childhood experiences in Northern Ireland were far from the trauma millions of children in Syria have been forced to endure, but I would come to recognize that sense of normality, an unquestioning tolerance of ways of life that seem disastrous to the outside world.
That sense of the stubborn permanence of everyday life even amid the worst circumstances runs throughout the book. Take, for example, her description of a ride through Mogodishu, Somalia:
Getting around Mogadishu with the African Union meant traveling in their armored vehicles, which are called Casspirs. Picture a cross between a small truck and a tractor, with no suspension. In the back is a kind of long, cylindrical container with tiny bulletproof windows along the sides. It’s like a mobile oven packed with about twelve soldiers strung along the sides facing one another. A gunner at the center stands on boxes of ammunition, and we can see only his legs as he swiveled around,
ready to react to any attack. We sat with our backs against the outer casing, bouncing around. The engine roared so loudly we couldn’t hear each other speak. Sweat rolled down from beneath my helmet, and my hands became so slippery that I struggled to hold the camera.
I peered out of the tiny, cracked glass windows, grubby and several inches thick to withstand bullets and bombs, and marveled at how close and yet far away this place seemed. I longed to walk around, and of course I was also deeply fearful of it. Instead I filmed from a perch on the ammo boxes, desperately trying to keep the camera still as the truck rocked beneath me.
Mogadishu is unmistakably beautiful, even with all the bullet holes and destruction. No matter how hot the city gets, there is always a strong breeze coming off the ocean, and the stark quality of the sunlight only brightens the colors everywhere. Palm trees rise up from the rubble, swaying in the wind, and giant heaps of pink bougainvillea lean over whitewashed walls, drawing your eye away from the ruins like a defiant smile. Vegetation had begun to reclaim some abandoned parts of the city, as creepers and trees spread through homes and backyards and peeling, abandoned swimming pools in once-bougie neighborhoods. It was like walking through someone else’s memories.
Ferguson’s memoir is filled with danger, with heartbreak, with the best and worst of humanity, with scenes of great beauty and of great horror. Her book allows you to witness it all through her words.
BOOK NEWS
Yes, my upgraded Literate Lizard Online Bookstore went live last Friday, and I hope you’ll check it out. I got it to the point of having just enough content to take it live, but I have lots more plans. I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.) And yes, the coupon code DAILYKOS still gets you 15% 0ff your order.
From The Hill, a story about a backlash and recall campaign against some MAGA conservative members of the local school board: The book ban backlash has arrived just in time to mobilize voters
The local recall effort is getting national headlines because it looks so much like major foreshadowing of how censorship fever will play out in the next elections, and who will benefit more: Republicans who support censorship or Democrats and others who don’t. Right now, it looks increasingly like the rush to embrace book bans will backfire on the MAGA crowd. And that’s exactly how it should be.
Grifters gotta grift: Donald Trump Received $5.75 Million In Royalties For A Book That Largely Features Photos In The Public Domain
In a financial disclosure filed last week, Trump reported $5.75 million in royalties in connection with a publishing agreement for “A MAGA Journey.” That title was the initial name for “Our Journey Together,” which showcases photos by Trump’s official White House photographer and were already in the public domain and available for anyone to use. The former president added his own captions.
It’s also possible those book sales are as inflated as his claims to wealth. A spokesperson for the publisher said over 500,000 copies have been sold, but offered no documentation. It is impossible to verify, as most of the sales by publisher Winning Team Publishing, started by Donald Trump, Jr. and a former Trump campaign official, are through a private website, which are not tracked by the usual publishing industry statisticians. In addition, Winning Team Publishing was paid some $231,000 by Trump’s combined political action and fundraising committee. Much of that money was used to buy books, which are given away as swag to donors.
The letter calls on Sam Altman, c.e.o. of OpenAI; Sundar Pichai, c.e.o. of Alphabet; Mark Zuckerberg, c.e.o. of Meta; Emad Mostaque, c.e.o. of Stability AI; Arvind Krishna, c.e.o. of IBM; and Satya Nadella, c.e.o. of Microsoft to “mitigate the damage to our profession” done by AI. It calls on them to obtain permission for use of authors’ copyrighted material in their generative AI programs, compensate writers fairly for the past and ongoing use of their works in generative AI programs and compensate writers fairly for the use of their works in AI output, whether or not the outputs are infringing under current law.
THIS WEEK’S NEW NONFICTION
Also see my weekly comment in today’s Black Kos diary of this week’s books of particular interest to Black and Latinx readers.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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