Category Archives: Books

March 4, 2013

STORYTELLING: Amazing Global Kidnapping story from Joel Millman at WSJ

images-2My homeboy from years in Mexico, Joel Millman, at the Wall Street Journal, has written a fantastic story of kidnapping of Eritreans, who are then traded by networks of kidnapping gangs, sometimes several times and across several borders.

The Eritreans are migrants/refugees fleeing their country and looking for work in nearby countries and are kidnapped by Bedouins.

The kidnapping gangs have blossomed in the vacuum of political supervision in Egypt’s Sinai desert as Egypt has been dealing with its many other issues in the last year.

Remarkable story about the global economy and the vast lagoons of impunity that exist due to political borders and agencies that have faltered or have not changed with the same velocity as economics — which might be exactly the prescription for what spawns criminal gangs and mafias.

Screen Shot 2013-03-04 at 6.12.50 AMCheck out the video of Joel talking with one kidnapping victim, and explaining the genesis of his story.

By the way, Joel’s been doing these kinds of stories about migrants and the borderless world for many years now and he’s one of the best around.

His book, The Other Americans, is a great series of vignettes about folks from around the world changing our country. His chapter on the Patel motel clan is worth the price of the book.

Photo: Sinai Desert; Photo Credit: Wall Street Journal

Map: Middle East; Credit: Google Maps

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March 1, 2013

STORYTELLING: What’s Your Favorite Dr. Seuss book?

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“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

 

One of the great storytellers in English and true independent spirits was born on this date.

Dr. Seuss, who taught kids the importance of being yourself, trying new things (Green Eggs and Ham), not being afraid of going out on your own, was born today in 1902.

The great Doctor (Theodore Geisel) did all that in perfectly rhymed (he knew how to count syllables) sentences, with whacky characters and drawings, exploding forever the “See Spot Run” children-book model.

The Cat in the Hat contained 236 different words. It’s been published in 12 languages, including Latin.

To think he wrote it in 1954, the year the Army-McCarthy hearings took place, the stifled and conformist 1950s, makes him one of the radicals of that decade, if you ask me.

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?” Sounds like the motto for the 1960s. (Maybe the mid-1950s was when the 1960s really began.)

As a wanna-be writer of children’s books — with two unpublished manuscripts, including one rhymed — I have particular appreciation for his rhyme and rhythm schemes, and his close attention to syllable count in each line.

Here’s some great Dr Seuss quotes.images-1

Happy Birthday, Doc!

 Yertle the Turtle is one of my favorites, along with Green Eggs and Ham, as all my life people have occasionally called me Sam I Am.

What’s your favorite Dr. Seuss book?

 

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September 6, 2012

WRITING: Blocking the Internet

Salon has an article on novelists using software programs to deny themselves access to the Internet.

This is what I need. I wrote my second book — Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream — in a cafe mercifully before the era of Wi-Fi hookups.

My focus was deep, as I listened to music via headphones and wrote for 5-6 hours at a time for weeks. I remember reaching profound levels of concentration doing that.

Now, Wi-Fi allows us to cut away at any moment when the writing gets tough. Very frustrating and counterproductive.

 

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June 1, 2012

MEXICO: Democracy Interrupted by Jo Tuckman

Those interested in Mexico and its transition away from a one-party state should be glad to hear that Jo Tuckman, a former colleague, has published a book on the topic

Mexico: Democracy Interrupted is just out. I found it in my mailbox an hour ago.

Should be quite worth reading, as Tuckman has been writing from Mexico for many years. Plus the topic couldn’t be more relevant: Describing what happened to the great democratic promise of Mexico two sexenios after the country opted, peacefully, to throw off the chains of 70+ years of PRI rule.

It now finds itself in the middle of a medieval drug war. Few of the deep reforms that were hoped for, and are necessary, to transform the country into something ready for the 21st Century global economy have been achieved.

Meanwhile, the country seems run by, and according to the interests of, the leaders of the top three political parties, who remain about as unaccountable as the president was under the PRI regime.

I’m reminded of Langston Hughes’ poem, “A Dream Deferred.”

Congratulations, Jo!

 

 

 

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March 8, 2012

WRITING: The Commandments — What are yours?

What are your writing commandments?

As I prepare to head off to the Tucson Festival of Books tomorrow, I feel like returning to the basics of writing that are always so refreshingly simple.

My colleague Martin Beck passed on writing commandments from Brit George Orwell, which you can read here.

Ad man legend David Ogilvy has these commandments. I particularly like his view that writing is not a God-given ability, but a craft that anyone can learn.

Novelist Henry Miller chimes in with these 11 commandments.

It’s wonderful how similar they all are.

So again I ask, What are your writing commandments?

I hope it won’t sound too presumido to say that any Sam Quinones Commandments would include, in no particular order:

-Read a lot — above all On Writing Well, By William Zinsser, and Calvin Trillin, too (& Bob Baker, my former LAT colleague).

-If your story isn’t working, you need to report more.

-Cut as many words with Latin roots as possible. “Problematize” is a word I once saw somewhere. (Yikes!)

-Remember the difference between “that” and “which”

-Never use the word “ongoing” and be very careful whenever using “process” with an adjective, e.g. “the writing process” (Yikes!)

-Remove adjectives whenever possible. Adverbs, too.

-The ending is at least as important as the beginning.

-Leave the office. Now.

 

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March 7, 2012

STORYTELLING: Tucson Festival of Books

Hey all — I’ll be at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend, with an event both Saturday and Sunday, both at 11:30 a.m.

Digging in the Dirt: A Discussion of Setting as Character
Panel / Sat 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Student Union – Tucson Room

Windows into Their World: Creative Writing with Latino Youth
Nuestras Raíces Workshop
Workshop / Sun 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Integrated Learning Center – Room 141

If you’re in Tucson, drop by…..

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February 25, 2012

BOOKS: The American Revolution

I’m reading now Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which follows my finishing Founding Brothers (Joseph Ellis) a few weeks ago.

I’m woefully unread about the American Revolution, to my embarrassment.

Anyway, as I’ve read I’ve found myself being rather down on Thomas Jefferson. Not so much because he owned slaves, which is a startling thing for a guy so interested in individual liberty, but it was  part of life in Virginia and I’m loathe to blame people so far back in time for what was commonplace.

Rather, it was his utopian idea of small govt, and his idea of continual revolution.

He sounds like a Leon Trotsky, who I think was remarkably naive for an educated guy and never understood the full implications of his theories.

In reaction to the English monarch, Jefferson apparently developed this idea of a country with nothing but small businessmen and small farmers and all-but-nonexistent govt (though he later expanded the country enormously with the Louisiana Purchase).

He was quite at odds, in the end, with fellow Virginian, George Washington, over such things as federal taxes (sounds familiar). Yet Washington was living in the real world, seems to me, and faced the challenge of making a new govt work in a world of many threats, not the least of which was still England. So federal taxes, while unpopular, he saw as necessary to provide the services that held the country together.

The Jefferson ideal, while nifty parlor fodder, seems to me would have spelled the end of the new country very quickly, not to mention that it overlooked all the ways that small farmers and businessmen are enabled by the services a competent federal govt provides (roads, regulation of markets, post offices, etc).

He had that famous quote about the soil of a republic needing to be irrigated with the blood of tyrants every 20 years or so (a paraphrase) — similar to Trotsky and Lenin’s idea of perpetual revolution. I learned with dismay that TJ was a big fan of the French Revolution because of this, until well near the end of FR — by which time most folks had long seen it for the bloodthirsty disaster it was. Like the Soviet Revolution, the FR gave way to dictatorship, which I think is what Jefferson’s ideas would have led to as well in the US, finally.

 

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