Browse Powell's Sections Africa Asia Canada Classics Eastern Europe Journalism Latin America Russia Western Europe Top 5 Global Writing Books at Powell's The week of Mar 13 The Long Walk Rawicz, Slavomir We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families Gourevitch, Philip Wild Swans: Three daughters of China Chang, Jung King Leopolds Ghost: A Story Of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Hochschild, Adam Falling Leaves: The true story of an unwanted Chinese daughter Mah, Adeline Yen

I purposely fled the serenity of southeastern Wisconsin intending to encounter the world, but since 1989 it has become ever more difficult even to stay in the suburbs without encountering refugees, or at least the fact of them. Mark Fritz rightly considers it the defining fact of our time. Literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide - people who, as Fritz puts it in his Blue Ear interview with Peter Werbe, found themselves "standing in the way when history got made" - have stories like the one I've related glancingly above. Many are even more harrowing and pathetic.

Already by 1991, notes Fritz, the uprisings against Saddam Hussein in northern and southern Iraq following the Gulf War demonstrated a closely related fact, namely the fact that wars of the post-Cold War era were more likely to be internal affairs, the result of battles between people struggling to fill a power vacuum. Superpower proxy wars were passe. Destroying nations from within to create small, overlapping and incompatible new places was the thing to do. Displacing entire populations wasn't just the side effect of such struggles. It was the whole point.

Lost on Earth joins a heightened awareness of global trends and interconnections to ground-level knowledge and experience of particular upheavals in particular places throughout the 1990s and throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East. If journalism is mainly to do with gleaning facts, and writing is first about finding meaning and patterns, Fritz is adept at both, and the result is distinctive and impressive.

S: A Novel about the Balkans
by Slavenka Drakulic
Reviewed by Brendan Howley

This Communist-spawned heritage of prison literature by women has a new addition in Slavenka Drakulic's S: A Novel about the Balkans, a harrowing account of the systematic rape of Bosnian Muslim women by Serb paramilitaries during the 1992-95 war of secession.

As Tito's "paper house" was blown away in a hurricane of mayhem, the sensational nature of these war crimes, committed by all three sides, swamped the Western media when the allegations first surfaced; in particular the systematic Serb sexual assaults drew the revulsion of the world. I was in Belgrade and western Bosnia in the fall of 1993; the first refugee atrocity reports, the core of the evidence which eventually led to the war crimes tribunal at The Hague, were then being assembled by Professor Cherif Bassiouni and others.

It was clear even then, even in a propagandized Belgrade where no one believed what their hillfolk cousins were doing, that the systematic practice of rape as a means of dehumanizing a political enemy was a return to the mediaeval barbarities of the Crusades and the Hundred Years' War, with a vengeance.

Drakulic's strength as a writer is her cool journalistic detachment: she captures the telling detail almost offhandedly as the sentences build, until the reader is cornered. Her description of S's relationship with The Captain (she becomes his lover as a means of survival) is so beautifully balanced that the moral nightmare her life has become -- giving her body that her soul may survive as something like her own -- is at once as easy as breathing and as calculated as taxation.

The Chain Gang: One Newspaper versus the Gannett Empire
by Richard McCord

From Ian Lind's BlueEar.com review:

Gannett's street-level tactics rarely emerge into public view, making McCord's descriptions extremely valuable and thought-provoking. Reporters and editors typically are as ignorant about their own newspaper's business tactics as the general public, and McCord forces us to consider what's going on daily on the other side of the editorial/business divide.

But both his case studies are dated, stemming from the period when self-described SOB Allen Neuharth guided Gannett's growth from a regional chain to an international media powerhouse. We're left wondering whether these tactics, even if common two decades ago, remain such a key part of the current corporate landscape.

McCord's writing conveys an underlying weariness, a negative, defeated, just-plain-worn-out sense of battle fatigue that I initially found aggravating. Although conveying outrage, McCord is, from the first page to the last, a reluctant warrior, repeatedly pleading to be excused from battle.

One reason for pessimism, McCord correctly notes, is the failure of journalists to report on the controversial developments within our own industry and profession. Although several major papers reported on McCord's investigations, there was virtually no independent follow-up.

And, on the Blue Ear Books discussion list, Michael Betzold responds:

I greatly admire Lind's part in the fight against Gannett in Hawaii. The court victory that put a monkey wrench in the corporate shutdown plans should be applauded, even if it is not the final word. Lind has provided a great service as well with his ongoing diary about the events there in the past few months.

I had the pleasure to meet and talk with Richard McCord a couple years ago when he came to Detroit. I found McCord to be a hard-headed newspaperman with great understanding of the difficulties of fighting Gannett. He has fought that corporation on many levels and it is understandable, I think, that he believes the prospects of prevailing ultimately are slim.

So too is the case in Detroit. When it became clear that the July 1995 newspaper strike was going to last more than a few weeks, the unions talked about lasting "one day longer." The publisher of the Gannett-owned News, Bob Giles, openly vowed that Gannett would appeal all court decisions and drag out the fight until every last striker was dead or had moved away.

Now, 4 1/2 years later, both sides are still (nominally) standing, but there are countless casualties. Many of the strikers are dead or gone -- few are left to carry on the fight. ... McCord's book is a valuable document that examines all the tactics and techniques -- many of them unethical and some of them that definitely should be white-collar crimes -- that Gannett uses and has used to bludgeon and batter opposing newspapers and to beat back unions. Gannett is the number one chain in the USA, and also the number one union-bashing publisher -- the connection is not accidental.