Nelly Furtado Inspires 'The Spirit Indestructible'

Audio for this story from Tell Me More will be available at approx. 3:00 p.m. ET

September 20, 2012

Enlarge Courtesy of the artist

Nelly Furtado at NPR in New York.

Courtesy of the artist

Nelly Furtado at NPR in New York.

Singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado has sold more than 16 million albums and 18 million singles worldwide. She's gone multiplatinum in 32 countries and won a bevy of awards, including a U.S. Grammy and the Canadian and British equivalents.

But after Furtado recorded her last album, Mi Plan, in Spanish and took home a 2010 Latin Grammy for it, she was unsure about singing in English again. She even considered retiring as a pop musician.

In an interview with Tell Me More host Michel Martin, Furtado said, "After each album, I go through this phase where I kind of question everything, but then the music always pulls me back in. The music always gets me back in the studio, doing what I love to do."

Furtado's latest English-language album (her fifth album overall), The Spirit Indestructible, came out Tuesday.

Writing in Spanish taught her to think about songs in terms of themes, metaphors and things she never thought about when writing in English. "I took that back into The Spirit Indestructible — this new one — and I feel very proud of the lyrics. I think they're a lot more cohesive than my past work," she said.

The inspiration for the album came from a trip to Africa about two years ago to shoot a documentary for Free the Children. The charity has built hundreds of schools for youth and provides clean water and health care to millions of people worldwide.

Furtado said that while she was in Kenya, she felt a renewed sense of joy, an affirmation in hope, and an excitement for the future — all while reading books about the past, such as Isabel Allende's Island Beneath the Sea.

Enlarge Andres Recio

Nelly Furtado with Spencer West

Andres Recio

Nelly Furtado with Spencer West

The album's title track was inspired by Spencer West. At age 4, West lost his legs due to a genetic disease. Now he's an author and a speaker for Free the Children.

Furtado explained, "He was going on this epic climb that he had been planning for years up Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest peak in Africa, to raise money for clean water projects and also to motivate his, you know, all these kids that kind of look up to him to redefine their 'possible.' And I thought, 'That's the true spirit indestructible!' "

Other songs on the album that follow that inspirational theme include "Believers (Arab Spring)," "Miracles" and "The Most Beautiful Thing." Furtado said that people have to take the time to live, and that making mistakes, falling down and getting up again is all part of living — ideas she likes to explore in her songs. "Music is soul food, and I think you find the hungry people whereever they are," she said.

Furtado's sound has evolved over the years. Whoa Nelly! (2000) belongs to the mind, Folklore (2003) belongs to the heart, Loose (2006) belongs to the body and The Spirit Indestructible (2012) belongs to the spirit, she said.

She always tries to make her songs universal, she said, but she recognizes that her musical journey has alienated some fans.

"You have successes, you have failures and everything in between, but at the end of the day, the music speaks louder than all of that. And when you see people singing certain songs at your shows, it always makes you feel better, you know?"

19 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/20/161403153/nelly-furtado-inspires-the-spirit-indestructible?ft=1&f=1008
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Watch This: Filmmaker Kevin Smith's Varied Tastes

Mike Coppola/Getty Images

Kevin Smith has served as a writer, actor and director for films such as Clerks.

Kevin Smith — comic-book guru, writer-director of Clerks and Chasing Amy — shares some of his must-see movie and TV recommendations with NPR's Steve Inskeep. Smith is the latest guest in Morning Edition's series Watch This.

---

The Comeback

The show, a mockumentary in the style of The Office, follows a once-famous actress who has the chance to regain relevance and popularity on a new sitcom while simultaneously starring on a reality TV show.

Despite only running for one season, the HBO comedy, starring Lisa Kudrow, earned the actress an Emmy nomination — and critical acclaim — after her long-running hit Friends went off the air.

"It is, like, pitch perfect Hollywood satire" Smith says. "It's hysterically funny. In places really touching and heartbreaking, but it was a really clever and well done idea that didn't really get enough attention or exposure."

---

The Bad News Bears

This 1976 film stars Walter Matthau as the coach of a terrible little league baseball team. "People go, 'Oh, I've seen that story before.' And then you go, 'Well, yes, but this was the first time," Smith says. And that's what makes this film one of his picks.

Smith not only appreciated the originality of the film when he first saw it, but also admired its heart.

"It had incredible honesty, authenticity and edge. Nobody seems like they're acting."

Where the film really shines, according to Smith, is in its frank characterizations of children in the 1970s. "The kids are cursing, dropping racial epithets. The kids are bullying one another," Smith says. "It was literally a movie you'd watch and say, 'This doesn't even feel like a movie. This feels like my little league team.'"

---

Snapped

"This, to me, is a show that every man who's married needs to watch," Smith says. Now in its 7th season on the Oxygen network, Snapped features the stories of real women who have been accused of murder.

Smith admits that he uses the show for research.

"I sit there and watch it with my wife. I constantly look over at her to see if she's taking down notes," Smith says.

"It's crazy how many of these chicks break out the antifreeze," Smith says. "Because — and this is something I learned from Snapped — it's sweet," he adds as a caution.

Enlarge Gene Page/AMC

A group of humans struggles to survive a zombie apocalypse in AMC's The Walking Dead.

Gene Page/AMC

A group of humans struggles to survive a zombie apocalypse in AMC's The Walking Dead.

---

The Walking Dead

Talking Dead

The Walking Dead, based on the graphic-novel series of the same name, follows a group of zombie apocalypse survivors. Smith believes the AMC drama is best enjoyed with its talk-show counterpart, Talking Dead.

"The beauty of The Walking Dead is that they take their time telling the story. It's literally like a soap opera," Smith says. He compares his attitude toward The Walking Dead to his grandmother's love of The Young and the Restless.

The appeal of the companion show, Talking Dead, in Smith's opinion is in its similarity to sports commentary.

"For years, whenever you watched sports, man, there's like, an hour of the game and two hours of people pontificating about the game. Now, with Talking Dead, you've got a program that's kind of the same thing."

---

Hockey: A People's History

The CBC's 10-episode documentary series, produced in 2006, traces hockey's history through reenactments, archival footage and interviews with some of the game's greats.

"It's a really wonderful telling of the story of not just the game that Canada created, but the land that spawned it and the people that populate it."

Smith is not Canadian, but is a self-proclaimed "Canadaphile."

In the series, hockey is serious business.

"They show you just how important that game is to that country, and how it actually helped create a national identity," Smith says. "I've not seen a miniseries that engaged me so thoroughly."

20 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/20/161428962/watch-this-filmmaker-kevin-smiths-varied-tastes?ft=1&f=1008
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New In Paperback Sept. 17-23

Fiction and nonfiction releases from Alan Hollinghurst, Thomas Frank, Siddhartha Deb, Emmanuel Carrere and Mindy Kaling.

The Stranger's Child

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Swimming-Pool Library returns with an astonishing novel that traces the evolution of English society through the life and (ever fluctuating) legacy of a poet modeled after Rupert Brooke. It's a high-wire act that jumps between perspectives and generations as minor characters are catapulted into prominence, offering a rich education in literary and queer history. Still, according to National Book Critics Circle President Eric Banks, it all feels effortless. Banks praises the book, calling it a "masterpiece of exacting irony and sinuous prose."

News and Reviews

Pity The Billionaire

The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

How did the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 give birth to a conservative populist revolt? That's the question Thomas Frank tries to answer in his sharp-tongued liberal polemic, Pity The Billionaire. In it, Frank — whose previous books include What's the Matter With Kansas? — writes that the recent revival of the right is just as extraordinary as "if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster." He writes, "Before 2009, the man in the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht." And yet, Frank says, that's become the central paradox of our time.

News and Reviews

The Beautiful And The Damned

A Portrait of the New India

Years after leaving his small village in northern India, journalist and novelist Siddhartha Deb set out to explore the true impact of globalization on his homeland. He started by working undercover in an Indian call center, an experience that paved the way for his nonfiction mosaic, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. In the book, Deb follows the lives of a rural farmer, an ambitious hotel worker and an affluent movie producer to expose the dark side of Indian prosperity. He finds that, inevitably, the globalization that helped make India a world player continues to leave millions behind.

News and Reviews

Lives Other Than My Own

French novelist Emmanuel Carrere's memoir begins on a beach in Sri Lanka on Dec. 26, 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami wiped out tens of thousands of lives. Carrere was there vacationing with his partner, but, thanks to a fluke of timing, he wasn't on the beach when the tsunami hit. Carrere did, however, witness the awful spectacle of his friends, Delphine and Jerome, discovering that their daughter had been swept out to sea. NPR critic John Freeman calls Carrere a "beguiling" writer and praises the way he "winds back the clock, novelistic style, to describe how his friends' family decided to come to Sri Lanka at all, turning a faraway island into a second home. Telescoping out and then back in to the trauma, he reveals the way such a disaster can feel like the sudden revelation of a fate for which one was always destined."

News and Reviews

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Much of actress Mindy Kaling's humor is rooted in something that might seem infeasible: using logic to explore American culture. But it works — and works well — because Kaling uses a type of circular logic that's all her own. Just consider this 2011 tweet: "Can everyone buy my book please? I wanna quit the business and homeschool my kids real weird." That sense of twisted earnestness is what has made Kaling's TV alter ego, Kelly Kapoor, a hit with audiences of The Office. And it's a sensibility that runs through Kaling's new book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? In humorous essays and lists, she shares her thoughts on her transformation from sensitive Indian girl to TV comedy player, her relationship with her mother, and the haphazard creative process of The Office's writers' room.

News and Reviews

Charlotte Abbott edits "New in Paperback." A contributing editor for Publishers Weekly, she also leads a weekly chat on books and reading in the digital age every Friday from 4-5 p.m. ET on Twitter. Follow her at @charabbott or check out the #followreader hashtag.

20 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/20/161400868/new-in-paperback-sept-17-23?ft=1&f=1008
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T.C. Boyle's 'San Miguel' Is No Island Paradise

San Miguel is the name of a treeless island off the coast of California where, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a few nervy ranchers struggled to raise sheep. San Miguel is also the name of T. Coraghessan Boyle's chilling and beautiful new novel, which is loosely based on the memoirs of those ranchers.

It is a striking departure from Boyle's past work. In 13 satirical novels, Boyle has skewered all manner of egoists and kooks, ranging from health food gurus (The Road to Wellville) and hippies (Drop City) to Alfred Kinsey (The Inner Circle). He is skewering no one here, and it takes a solid 40 pages for a longtime fan to trust that he's put away his knives for real. He has. While the prose remains as exuberant and biting as ever, he has stripped away every trace of his trademark irony to stunning effect.

Enlarge Jamieson Fry/Viking Adult

T.C. Boyle's books include Drop City and The Road to Wellville.

Jamieson Fry/Viking Adult

T.C. Boyle's books include Drop City and The Road to Wellville.

Divided into three sections, the novel begins in the 1880s as Marantha Waters arrives on San Miguel, literally gasping for breath. Wracked by tuberculosis, she hopes that the island's "virginal air" will vanquish her disease and placate her restless husband. But from the moment she sets foot on its bleak shore, flustered and cold, ignored by her more robust companions (including her husband), she understands her folly. The grim house is drafty and water-stained, overrun with mice. A newborn lamb she tries to rescue dies a hideous death in her kitchen. Her husband proudly brings home human bones — "naked and white and fissured with age" — he finds in the sand.

The savagery of nature is all around her, but also inside her, as she huddles in the bedroom coughing up blood and "sputum that was like the gristle cut from a piece of meat." (Boyle's descriptions of consumption are unsparing.) And far from healing her, the "virginal air" haunts her sleepless nights: "The wind kept beating, keening, unholy, implacable, and it was as if it were aimed at her, and her alone. As if it had come for her. Come to blow her away across the waters and force her down beneath the waves, down and down and down to the other place, darkness eternal."

The wind has other messages for Edith, Marantha's teenaged daughter, who is the subject of the book's middle section. Edith is held captive on the island by her stepfather and "at night when she lay in her damp bed — everything damp, always damp, mold creeping over the mattress like a wet licking tongue and the walls beaded with condensation — she listened to the wind, to the distant tolling of ships bells and the fading ghostly cries of the foxes that were no bigger than a cat and her mind spun away into fantasies of escape." Imagery doesn't get much more gothic than that. Edith's schemes to flee grow ever more degrading and desperate, and if the island doesn't break her like it does her mother, it leaves an indelible mark on her character.

But just when you've decided Boyle has written a horror novel, he introduces a long, tender love story that brings the narrative to its bittersweet conclusion. In 1930, newlyweds Elise and Herbie Lester arrive on San Miguel to start their lives together. While Herbie is prone to disturbing mood swings (today it's called "manic depression"), he and Elise find peace and equilibrium on the island "set down in the heaving froth of the Pacific Ocean." While Elise's first impression of San Miguel is as wretched as Marantha's, she finds and creates loveliness in its sere landscape. She and Herbie raise two daughters here, and one of the small beauties of the novel is Boyle's depiction of a calm and happy marriage distinguished by mutual accommodation and ongoing erotic love.

All idylls must come to an end, of course, as do the Lesters'. But Boyle never suggests that they — or any of these people — deserved their fate. In the past, Boyle has moved characters around like puppets to score satirical points. In San Miguel, he sets them free.

20 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/20/161062913/t-c-boyle-s-san-miguel-is-no-island-paradise?ft=1&f=1008
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A Leap Of The Imagination Across The 'River Of Bees'

Ursula Le Guin comes immediately to mind when you turn the pages of Kij Johnson's first book of short stories, her debut collection is that impressive. The title piece has that wonderful power we hope for in all fiction we read, the surprising imaginative leap that takes us to recognize the marvelous in the everyday.

"It starts with a bee sting," Johnson opens, as a woman named Linna leaves Seattle to take her dying dog on a salutary road trip through the intermountain West and finds the road is blocked east of Missoula by a bizarre phenomenon, which Johnson describes in perfectly metaphorical terms. "The air above the road," we read, "truly is flowing darkness, like ink dropped in moving water." Linna asks the driver of the Montana state police SUV parked at the side of the road about the nature of the delay.

"The Bee River is currently flooding east- and westbound lanes of 94, ma'am," he explains. He suggests some alternate routes to some other drivers stalled there along with Linna and Sam. She chooses, instead, to follow the river to its mouth, and off on this quest she goes, dog beside her.

Alongside the straightforward realism of her travels, we read of her sightings of the river, which Johnson gives us in more lovely lyric sentences whenever it appears. When she first gets on the trail of its source, the "sky lightens," turning from pearl to lavender to blue, while the river remains "a dark mist like the shifting of a flock of flying starlings, like a pillar of gnats over a highway in hot August dusk, like a million tiny fish changing direction. South to north, the river runs like cooling lava, like warm molasses. It might be 8 feet deep, though in places is much less, in others much more. It changes as she watches ... "

There's an attractive, even compelling variation on this motif of following or crossing mysterious waters in the novella-length "The Man Who Bridged the Mist." In this long and consistently delightful piece of story-making, Johnson reverses the polarities and sets the tone of her tale — about a mythical empire divided nearly in half by a river composed of a constantly shifting and evolving skein of mist — much more as fantasy than real. The effect is, again, quite lyrical.

Enlarge Small Beer Press

Kij Johnson is a novelist, short story writer and poet. She won a 2012 Nebula Award for the novella-length story, "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," included in this collection.

Small Beer Press

Kij Johnson is a novelist, short story writer and poet. She won a 2012 Nebula Award for the novella-length story, "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," included in this collection.

In the story called "Fox Magic," which Johnson created out of her research into the nature of the fantastic in Japanese culture, the unfolding of the story — about a vixen who falls in love with a feudal nobleman and bewitches him into thinking she is a royal personage who has fallen in love with him — comes in bursts of events that I found bewitching in themselves, as when the she-fox first begins her campaign to cloud the man's mind and win his love:

"The fox-path was long and wandering. We walked along it until we saw lights. 'Home,' I said, and took his hand and led him the last few steps. He was lost in the magic then, and didn't notice that he had to enter my beautiful house by lying belly-down in the dirt and wriggling under the storehouse."

I was just as bewitched by this story as by the way Johnson handles the science-fiction material. In "Dia Chjerman's Tale," she delivers an entire space epic in a few masterly pages. "Spar" gives us the rush of a sexual escapade between a human woman and an alien that doesn't just push the envelope — it seals it, and sends it off into the mail. But it's "The Horse Raiders" that reminded me most of Le Guin, with its deeply imagined sense of distant other-planetary culture, its powerful female narrator, its vital sense of life, wherever we happen to live it, on Earth or in some distant constellation that's dying in a corner of the sky.

20 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/20/158433061/a-leap-of-the-imagination-across-the-river-of-bees?ft=1&f=1008
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Watch This: Filmmaker Kevin Smith's Varied Tastes

Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approx. 9:00 a.m. ET

September 20, 2012

Mike Coppola/Getty Images

Kevin Smith has served as a writer, actor and director for films such as Clerks.

Kevin Smith — comic-book guru, writer-director of Clerks and Chasing Amy — shares some of his must-see movie and TV recommendations with NPR's Steve Inskeep. Smith is the latest guest in Morning Edition's series Watch This.

---

The Comeback

The show, a mockumentary in the style of The Office, follows a once-famous actress who has the chance to regain relevance and popularity on a new sitcom while simultaneously starring on a reality TV show.

Despite only running for one season, the HBO comedy, starring Lisa Kudrow, earned the actress an Emmy nomination — and critical acclaim — after her long-running hit Friends went off the air.

"It is, like, pitch perfect Hollywood satire" Smith says. "It's hysterically funny. In places really touching and heartbreaking, but it was a really clever and well done idea that didn't really get enough attention or exposure."

---

The Bad News Bears

This 1976 film stars Walter Matthau as the coach of a terrible little league baseball team. "People go, 'Oh, I've seen that story before.' And then you go, 'Well, yes, but this was the first time," Smith says. And that's what makes this film one of his picks.

Smith not only appreciated the originality of the film when he first saw it, but also admired its heart.

"It had incredible honesty, authenticity and edge. Nobody seems like they're acting."

Where the film really shines, according to Smith, is in its frank characterizations of children in the 1970s. "The kids are cursing, dropping racial epithets. The kids are bullying one another," Smith says. "It was literally a movie you'd watch and say, 'This doesn't even feel like a movie. This feels like my little league team.'"

---

Snapped

"This, to me, is a show that every man who's married needs to watch," Smith says. Now in its 7th season on the Oxygen network, Snapped features the stories of real women who have been accused of murder.

Smith admits that he uses the show for research.

"I sit there and watch it with my wife. I constantly look over at her to see if she's taking down notes," Smith says.

"It's crazy how many of these chicks break out the antifreeze," Smith says. "Because — and this is something I learned from Snapped — it's sweet," he adds as a caution.

Enlarge Gene Page/AMC

A group of humans struggles to survive a zombie apocalypse in AMC's The Walking Dead.

Gene Page/AMC

A group of humans struggles to survive a zombie apocalypse in AMC's The Walking Dead.

---

The Walking Dead

Talking Dead

The Walking Dead, based on the graphic-novel series of the same name, follows a group of zombie apocalypse survivors. Smith believes the AMC drama is best enjoyed with its talk-show counterpart, Talking Dead.

"The beauty of The Walking Dead is that they take their time telling the story. It's literally like a soap opera," Smith says. He compares his attitude toward The Walking Dead to his grandmother's love of The Young and the Restless.

The appeal of the companion show, Talking Dead, in Smith's opinion is in its similarity to sports commentary.

"For years, whenever you watched sports, man, there's like, an hour of the game and two hours of people pontificating about the game. Now, with Talking Dead, you've got a program that's kind of the same thing."

---

Hockey: A People's History

The CBC's 10-episode documentary series, produced in 2006, traces hockey's history through reenactments, archival footage and interviews with some of the game's greats.

"It's a really wonderful telling of the story of not just the game that Canada created, but the land that spawned it and the people that populate it."

Smith is not Canadian, but is a self-proclaimed "Canadaphile."

In the series, hockey is serious business.

"They show you just how important that game is to that country, and how it actually helped create a national identity," Smith says. "I've not seen a miniseries that engaged me so thoroughly."

20 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/19/161428962/watch-this-filmmaker-kevin-smiths-varied-tastes?ft=1&f=1008
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The Elusive, Endangered 'Knuckleball'

Break Thru Films

Tim Wakefield, formerly of the Boston Red Sox, was the oldest active player in the majors before retiring in 2011. For years he was the only pitcher throwing a knuckleball.

Knuckleball!

• Directors: Ricki Stern, Annie Sundberg
• Genre: Documentary
• Running Time: 90 minutes

Not rated

There are essentially two things that can happen with a knuckleball. It can float toward the plate without spin, jerk around like boozy relatives at a wedding hall and make the world's best hitters look like hapless Looney Tunes characters. Or it can float toward the plate with spin, lope with a steady trajectory at 65 mph and give the world's best hitters the juiciest slab of red meat this side of Sizzler. When a knuckleball specialist is on, he's a magician, conjuring the dark and mysterious forces of the universe; when he's off, he's the pot-bellied assistant manager throwing batting practice.

Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's documentary Knuckleball! — the curious exclamation mark suggests the biggest flop in Broadway history — considers one of baseball's greatest quirks with good humor and a glancing touch. Last seen following Joan Rivers around for the affectionate profile Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Stern and Sundberg view the small fraternity of knuckleball pitchers as outsiders in their own right. Just as Rivers was pegged as a groundbreaking female comedian, brash and vulgar in forbidding times, knuckleballers are cast as pariahs and freaks, a carnival act breezing through town. In other words, they're not real baseball players because real baseball players don't get laid up by a chipped fingernail.

Throughout the history of Major League Baseball, only one or two knuckleball pitchers have tended to play at any one time, which keeps the pitch on the endangered species list. Stern and Sundberg have done well to round up all the living knuckleballers for interviews, including old-timers like Phil Niekro, Charlie Hough and Jim Bouton, whose classic book Ball Four details his efforts to develop the knuckler when his other pitches faltered.

Enlarge Break Thru Films

Knuckleball! also features the only other active knuckleball pitcher during the 2011 season: R.A. Dickey of the New York Mets.

Break Thru Films

Knuckleball! also features the only other active knuckleball pitcher during the 2011 season: R.A. Dickey of the New York Mets.

Other than Niekro, nobody enters the league as a knuckleballer; the common denominator is desperation, a last-ditch effort to stay in the majors when all else has failed.

Stern and Sundberg focus on Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey, the only two active knuckleball pitchers during the 2011 season. The two men are on opposing career paths: Wakefield, still well-preserved after 19 years and two championships with the Boston Red Sox, intends to retire at the end of the season, which he hopes will include his 200th victory. Dickey, a journeyman pitcher who was kicked around to dozens of major and minor league squads, had refined the knuckler to devastating effect for the New York Mets and was expected to be the staff ace — if, of course, the pitch didn't betray him.

Wakefield and Dickey are great stories and endearing subjects, and their meetings with Niekro and Hough reveal a secret society of pitchers who openly trade bits of wisdom and commiserate over the times when the breakers didn't break. For managers, having a knuckleball pitcher on staff is an ulcerous condition: Even when the pitch works, the catcher can't always catch it, there are many passed balls and walks, and base-stealers have an extra step toward second. For this exclusive fraternity, winning the faith of managers, teammates and fans was and is a near-constant battle, requiring patience and indulgence in the worst of times.

Knuckleball! looks and feels like a standard ESPN documentary, slickly packaged and a little bloodless, and Stern and Sundberg lean a little heavily on music to goose up the excitement. It's better when they simply follow Wakefield's and Dickey's dramatic and circuitous paths to glory — and best when Niekro and Hough stop by to tell stories and pore over the mechanics of arm motion and grip. Together, they're stewards of a junk pitch, masters of a sandlot special, and they don't want its glorious mysteries to die with them.

20 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/19/161266664/the-elusive-endangered-knuckleball?ft=1&f=1008
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Debunking The 'Myth Of The Muslim Tide'

Audio for this story from Fresh Air from WHYY will be available at approx. 5:00 p.m. ET

September 19, 2012

The violent protests that erupted in the Middle East over a video insulting the Prophet Muhammad were in part a reflection of conflicting values — Islamic strictures on images of the prophet versus the Western principle of respect for free speech.

But journalist Doug Saunders says that the video itself reflects a troubling current in Western political discourse — an irrational fear of Muslim communities in Europe and the United States.

"The guy who made it was a bit obscure, but the people who've promoted it and circulated it are part of a very well-organized and very, very well-funded network of activists who've received funding from mainstream conservative foundations," Saunders tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies.

In his new book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide, Saunders says an increasingly influential group of writers and activists believes immigration and high birth rates will make Muslims a majority in Europe in coming decades — and that their hostility to Western values makes them a threat to Western culture, democracy and security.

Saunders argues that these fears are based on inaccurate assertions of fact, and he says the fear of Muslim immigration in the U.S. is similar to past chapters in American history about other immigrant groups.

Saunders is the London-based European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail. He's also the author of Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World.

---

Interview Highlights

On the Muslim tide in the United States

"During the years after George W. Bush ceased to be president, there [was] a power vacuum in the Republican Party. He was careful to keep anti-Muslim out of his party, probably because while waging a war in Iraq and another in Afghanistan, the more sane minds in the Republican Party realized it made sense not to be demonizing American Muslims.

Enlarge Randy Quan/Vintage

Doug Saunders is the author of Arrival City and London-based European bureau chief at The Globe and Mail. He is a four-time recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award.

Randy Quan/Vintage

Doug Saunders is the author of Arrival City and London-based European bureau chief at The Globe and Mail. He is a four-time recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award.

"But then, in the years after 2008, a group of people stepped in to many corners of Congress and Republican leadership who were adherents to these ideas about Muslims, had become almost single-ssue believers. ...

"And by the time the Republican leadership race took place in 2011, early 2012, four or five leading candidates including people like Newt Gingrich were willing to say things like, 'There is a stealth Sharia, there's a stealth plot among Muslim immigrants and their offspring in the United States to impose religious law upon the country.' This suddenly had become something that you could say in polite society, in political circles and so on, in Congress in the United States. And I should say that Mitt Romney has never apparently subscribed to or spoken of these ideas, so luckily, perhaps because he's himself from a religious minority."

On whether Muslims regard Islam as a spiritual matter or as an ideology

"We can measure this both by looking at what they say and looking at what they do. Because if members of a religious minority were really believing this, that were believing that religion is a guiding ideology that should control their actions, then they would be doing things — they would be ignoring the laws, they would be going to the mosque very often. ...

"What we find is the level of religiosity of religious observance among Muslims when they come to the West tends to fall fairly quickly to approximately the level of religious observance of the people around them. So when Muslims come to France from the Arab countries of North Africa, they tend to become not very religiously observant. About a fifth of them become outright atheist, which is similar to the rate of French Christians, and only about maybe 5 percent of them attend a mosque regularly. When they move to the United States, they become about as religious as American Christians are, which is fairly religious.

"So, yeah, about 47 percent of American Muslims will say, 'I think of myself as Muslim first and American second,' but that's almost exactly the same rate that non-Muslim Americans say, that American Christians say. Just shy of half of American Christians will say, 'I think of myself as Christian first, and American second.' So they tend to be loyal to their faith at about the same rate as Christians do in whatever country they arrive in."

On Muslim immigrants and integration

"In Europe, where they're coming from very poor rural areas — like the Rif Mountains of Morocco or the Anatolian Plain of Turkey or more remote parts of Pakistan or Bangladesh — you have a phenomenon where the parents strive in their sort of blue-collar industries that brought them in. And the daughters are often successful, but there's a propensity for the sons to drop out of secondary school at 16 and so on, and fall into troubled circles. Not necessarily into terrorism or anything like that — that tends to be a middle class thing that's isolated from mainstream immigrant communities — but they become economically unsuccessful and ghetto-ized because they drop out of school. ...

"And that's partly because nobody's paid any attention, partly because continental European education systems are very poor at mixtures of classes containing immigrants and non-immigrants, and partly because there are citizenship laws and various other laws that make it difficult — or sometimes impossible — for their parents to buy a house or put their kids in university that discourages people from becoming a part of the community. And one thing I've become very convinced of in working on this book is that culture is something that follows economic and educational integration. People become culturally integrated when they're a part of the economy and a part of the education system, and with every group of religious minority immigrants, this has been the case."

15 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/19/161168231/debunking-the-myth-of-the-muslim-tide?ft=1&f=1008
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'Life Of Objects' Tells A Cautionary WWII Fairy Tale

Audio for this story from Fresh Air from WHYY will be available at approx. 5:00 p.m. ET

September 19, 2012

Susanna Moore's latest novel, The Life of Objects, is a slim World War II saga that reads like a cautionary fairy tale: It's packed with descriptions of ornate furniture and paintings, lavish banquets, demons and diamonds. At the center of the story is a young girl bewitched by her own desire to live a larger life, a wish that's granted with grim exactitude. Clearly, The Life of Objects is not your father's standard-issue World War II novel; although, Moore's narrative angle on the war does remind me of Edmund de Waal's extraordinary 2010 memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes. In both books, the capricious nature of war — to obliterate or overlook — is explored through the fate of an aristocratic family's collection of fine art.

Our heroine and narrator in this novel is Beatrice Palmer, the only child of Protestant shopkeepers in the west of Ireland. The word Beatrice repeatedly uses to describe herself is "greedy" — greedy, not for money, but for something to happen. When the story opens in 1938, Beatrice, out of boredom, has taught herself how to make lace while she stands behind the counter of her family's shop. Beatrice explains that she's not allowed to read there, "lest it appear that I gave myself airs."

Soon enough, Beatrice's yearning for adventure is answered: A European countess, who's visiting the local landed gentry, sweeps into the shop, surveys the lacework, and whisks Beatrice off to Berlin, where she's to make tablecloths and the like for a wealthy couple, Felix and Dorothea Metzenburg. There's a Jane Eyre feel to Beatrice's arrival at the fabulous Metzenburg mansion, which is eerily near-empty of staff because of the coming war.

Instead of making lace, Beatrice is put to work packing up the Metzenburgs' array of priceless tchotchkes: "turned ivory" sculptures that are to be crated in barley; Old Master paintings rolled up pencil tight; and the Empress Josephine's yellow diamond sewn into a coat hem. Most of this treasure will be buried on the grounds of the Metzenburgs' country estate outside Berlin, where the family retreats for the duration. Felix, an otherwise good enough German, is on the outs, politically, with the Fuhrer; besides, as Beatrice tells us, Felix would much rather pursue his quaint connoisseur's life, satisfying "his compulsion to limit the world to the exquisite."

Enlarge Denise Applewhite/Knopf

Susanna Moore is the author of several books, including a memoir, I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai'i.

Denise Applewhite/Knopf

Susanna Moore is the author of several books, including a memoir, I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai'i.

Fat chance, not with those tanks ready to roll into Poland. The tension of this novel arises out of that disjunction between the static, gorgeously adorned life of the Metzenburgs and the depravity of war roiling just outside their gates. Moore is rightly celebrated for her lithe style as a writer and, in so many passages here, she nimbly jumps back and forth over the boundaries of the Metzenburg estate to give readers a sense of the chaos that's inevitably seeping through their charmed defenses. Here's Beatrice skittishly recalling the year 1943, a season of losses, outside the great house and in, as well as cosmic instability:

The butcher in the village disappeared that winter with his wife and twin sons ... An object left momentarily on a table — an inkwell or a branch of witch hazel carried from the woods — was gone when I returned for it, and an apple or a dish of almonds disappeared even if I hadn't left the room.

One night, ... I thought that I could hear thunder, but I decided that it was only the hundreds of military transports on their way to the Eastern Front. When the ... earth began to shake, I knew that it wasn't the lorries but the hum of hundreds of planes.

By war's end, Beatrice and her employers will be excavating that treasure she buried to barter for coffee made of roasted acorns, while marauding Russian troops violate their enchanted zone of neutrality. Moore doesn't exactly tell a "new" war story here; but, through Beatrice, she speaks of all-too-familiar atrocities in such a spellbinding way that she once again compels readers to, once again, listen. If the Brothers Grimm had tackled the rise and fall of the Third Reich, they might well have produced a tale that reads like The Life of Objects.

20 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/19/161173818/life-of-objects-tells-a-cautionary-wwii-fairy-tale?ft=1&f=1008
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'The Black Count' Cuts A Fascinating Figure

The novelist Alexandre Dumas — the one known for penning The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers — is often referred to as "Alexandre Dumas, pere." This is to distinguish him from his son, also a writer, who is identified as "Alexandre Dumas, fils." The thing is, there is an even older Alex Dumas who, while not a professional writer, made quite a name for himself in Revolutionary France. For the father of Alexandre Dumas, pere, the sword was mightier than the pen, and this larger-than-life figure's story heavily influenced the fiction of his literary offspring.

Historian Tom Reiss went to France specifically to uncover the papers and tell the story of this forgotten Dumas, the titular "Black Count" of Reiss' fascinating new book. Thomas-Alexandre (later, simply Alex) Dumas was born in 1762 in Saint-Domingue to a blackguard French aristocrat named Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie and one of his black mistresses. According to Reiss, the island colony — known as the "pearl of the West Indies" — accounted for two-thirds of France's overseas trade in the late 18th century. As such, Saint-Domingue was, in the author's words, "a vast infernal factory where labor never ceased and slaves regularly worked from sunup to past sundown in conditions rivaling the concentration camps and gulags of the twentieth century." It was from this Caribbean charnel house that Davy de la Pailleterie took his mixed-race young son to France for a free life and gentleman's education.

Enlarge Aventurina King/Crown

Tom Reiss' previous books include The Orientalist and Fuhrer-Ex; Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi.

Aventurina King/Crown

Tom Reiss' previous books include The Orientalist and Fuhrer-Ex; Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi.

Thomas-Alexandre enjoyed a period of relative equality in pre-Revolutionary France, and Reiss never ceases to remind the reader what a great looking young paragon he was: "His proportions were those of a Greek hero ... and his strength would be compared to Hercules's, though his hands and feet were said to be as delicate as those of the ladies he escorted into town." Thomas-Alexandre came of age at a time when his race was viewed by many in Paris as pleasantly exotic, and his encounters with the period's virulent racism were relatively few.

Thomas-Alexandre's enlistment in the Sixth Regiment of the Queen's Dragoons under the new name of "Alexandre Dumas" signaled a turning point in his life. His new moniker and army career clearly agreed with him, as Dumas rose quickly from lowly private to a heroic general leading an army of 50,000 men. His meteoric and profoundly unlikely rise through the ranks is stranger than fiction, and indeed Dumas, pere mined his father's life for much of his literary material. The son understandably idolized the father, who died when the boy was 4 years old.

What's slightly stranger is the historian Reiss' fawning over his subject. While Alex Dumas is an unquestionably fascinating figure, parts of the book read like an extended fan letter rather than objective, analytical work. It occasionally borders on the hyperbolic, akin to an American's idol worship of George Washington as a man who never lied and single-handedly won the American Revolution.

In Egypt, Dumas' fortunes — like those of The Count of Monte Cristo's Edmond Dantes — run afoul of a certain vindictive Corsican, and his life's story goes from adventure yarn to tragedy. While Napoleon goes on to power and glory, Dumas finds only imprisonment and early death. Throughout the book, Reiss argues that Alex Dumas is an important, criminally neglected historical figure quite apart from his relationship to his famous offspring. Despite Reiss' sometimes overblown regard, it's difficult to argue with him. That a former slave could rise on his merits so far, so fast some seven decades before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation is a truly amazing story, one that needs no literary embellishment.

19 Sep, 2012

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/19/161023945/the-black-count-cuts-a-fascinating-figure?ft=1&f=1008
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