The Smithian

Lionsgate has acquired screen rights to…Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Devil In The Grove: Thurgood Marshall, The Groveland Boys, And The Dawn Of A New America, by Gilbert King…Set in 1949, with Florida’s…orange industry as a backdrop, as citrus barons got rich on the backs of…Jim Crow labor, the novel tells the all-too-familiar story of four young black men falsely accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl, and the NAACP’s legal team’s attempts to free them. It was a case that would bring an…attorney by the name of Thurgood Marshall into the…fray…

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The pirogi were warm, the honey-cherry liqueur was uncorked and the…bookstore in…Brooklyn, was standing-room-only. Dagmara Dominczyk, an actress familiar from films like “Higher Ground” and television shows like “Person of Interest,” was back in the old Polish neighborhood to celebrate the publication of…a novel that mirrors her own experience as a Polish émigré.

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…a series of interwoven stories that start in Tehran’s Evin prison and ripple outward across families, continents and generations. The novel evokes the scents, sights and gut-wrenching emotions of oppression…

more, plus audio interview with the author, here.

…their skewed charisma makes them beguiling and quick-witted. Their cruelty can teach us important things about the cruelty of the wider world.

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…black poets are far more likely to appear together in presumable black anthologies because they have little chance of getting into those general anthologies. Sure, big-name poets achieve cross-over appeal and appear in black and general anthologies. But by and large, African American poets are published in designated black spaces.

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…about the effect China’s one-child policy has had in rural China. The effects haven’t been good.

In the years immediately following the Civil War, America appeared to possess the will and the means to end racial segregation and give the same rights enjoyed by whites to its 4 million…freed black slaves. These…goals, of course, were not achieved for another century. During the intervening decades, the South saw the rise of Jim Crow and Judge Lynch…Goldstone convincingly lays the blame for this tragedy at the door of the institution that could have made the difference but did not: the United States Supreme Court.

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…goes beyond the familiar marches and leaders to focus on movie theaters, skating rinks, dance halls, city parks, amusement parks, and swimming pools as places of struggle. In doing so, she brings in a new cast of characters—children, teenagers, mothers—and shows how the battles over access to urban leisure…extend well past the March on Washington…

more. plus an interview (audio) with the author, here.

…seeks to answer or at least address the many questions the country poses, such as how it got to be what it is…

Its simplicity makes it a relatively easy language to learn, and it owes that simplicity in part to the influence of another language brought to the Iberian Peninsula by invaders: Arabic. In their work to formalize their language, early Spanish grammar mavens were deeply influenced by the rigor of Arab scholars.

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“At this point, I think parents need to talk about data permanence before they talk about sex…”

I go numb, before being transported by an exquisitely fierce sensation to a plane I didn’t know existed. When I return I am hot, grateful and confused.

more from an excerpt, here.

…local and regional nonprofits have emerged as examples of how technology and a move away from the traditional advertising-based model of paying for newspaper journalism can provide vital watchdog coverage of government and local issues.

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Samantha Power will come to the job [as US Ambassador to the United Nations] with a deep and nuanced understanding of how the UN works. Her latest book, Chasing the Flame, chronicled the life and death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top UN official who was killed when terrorists struck the UN Compound in Iraq in 2003. Since the publication of the book…Power has been a vocal advocate for the safety and security of UN humanitarian workers around the world. This is a critically important issue [as] The UN has become a preferred target of Jihadi organizations in South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel…The UN is now gearing up for a major mission in Mali where the UN will almost certainly come under direct assault from Jihadi groups in a way that…could be unprecedented…On Syria, her influence could be lasting. Power is best known for her…A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, which was hugely influential in liberal foreign policy circles. The book argues that the institutions of US foreign policy failed to respond adequately to the big mass atrocity events since World War II.

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There is not much literature that illuminates the story of Taiwan before 1949, the year Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist party were chased out of Mainland China by the Communists…Prior to ‘49, Taiwan was occupied by the Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese until the end of World War II. It is a land of divided loyalties, a people who struggle to define themselves in a colonized homeland…My mother tells…of running to hide from American planes that were bombing the country. My father tells…of how things got worse when Nationalists came to “liberate” Taiwan. People were shot. Families starved. Nobody could be trusted…This novel tells the story of…the bright but least favored son of a wealthy Taiwanese family, coming of age at the end of World War II…The history of Taiwan and the Taiwanese is…one that should not be forgotten. Wu’s writing is compelling as a witness to this story.

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