Archive for May, 2009

Richard N. Haass

Posted By Zócalo On May 19, 2009

richardhaass
Richard N. Haass was born in Brooklyn, or as he put it, “a place where they used to play professional baseball before the Dodgers made that terrible decision.” Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of War of Necessity, War of Choice, entered the foreign policy field through an indirect route. Though he was engrossed by the Vietnam War debate in his high school and college years, he initially chose to study religion. “Religion took me to the Middle East to do some archaeology, and from there I decided I wanted to study the modern Middle East,” he said. “And here I am.”

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Let’s Make a Deal

Posted By Zócalo On May 19, 2009

Mario Benedetti, famed Uruguayan writer and activist, died Sunday at the age of 88. Renowned throughout Latin America, Benedetti wrote 60 novels, poems, short stories and plays on politics, love and life in Montevideo, where he was born and lived much of his life, barring his 12 years’ exile during the rule of a military dictatorship. When he returned, he took to having a daily lunch at a local restaurant, where fans would stop to say hello and ask for autographs. Below, a poem by Don Mario….

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When Should We Go To War?

Posted By Zócalo On May 19, 2009

Richard N. Haass

Richard N. Haass was pleased with the originality of his new book’s title — at least until he Googled it.

On a tip from a friend who thought War of Necessity, War of Choice sounded familiar, Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, discovered someone had claimed the phrase before him.

“Somebody beat me to it by 800 years….

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W. G. Sebald

Posted By Zócalo On May 18, 2009

W.G. Sebald, born May 18, 1944, wrote On the Natural History of Destruction to explore why the devastation of their country in World War II left so little a mark on German cultural memory. During the war, 131 German cities and towns were attacked by Allies, many of them were entirely destroyed. Six hundred thousand civilians died, and seven and a half million were left homeless. Below, an excerpt….

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Winifred Gallagher on Paying Attention

Posted By Zócalo On May 18, 2009

WG

Winifred Gallagher, author of House Thinking and The Power of Place, stopped by Zócalo’s offices to discuss her latest book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, which argues that learning to focus on the right things can make for a more meaningful life. Below, Gallagher explains what attention is and why it’s so crucial, and whether distractions and the devices that create them — smart phones, iPods — can ever be helpful….

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Feuilleton
Friday, December 3, 2010
How One Family Created Chinese America
Zócalo

The Lucky Ones, by Mae Ngai The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America by Mae Ngai Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.

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