“I was reading all this stuff and I just thought, these are the best scenes ever written for an actor. I knew all these out-of-work actors, these ACT alums, and we’re all sitting around waiting for the next great play to land in our laps so that we can get our health insurance, and I thought, why aren’t we doing literature on stage?
One of us heard something about Ernest Hemingway hating Ivan Turgenev, and we both worshipped Hemingway so we thought we should read Turgenev and learn to hate him too. Then we picked up "Fathers and Sons."
My dad discharged his weapon in action only once, while serving guard duty on a train to Sasebo transporting Korean men conscripted by the Japanese Imperial Army for hard labor during the war.
"I was talking to the neighbor, and we could hear a rocket whistle. When you hear the whistles, then at least you know it’s going somewhere else, not right on top of you. It hit the block behind us.”
Malcolm speaks to us directly in the same powerful, raw language that made him a proud militant, describing his upbringing, his crimes, his bigotry and misogyny, and his evolution into a human rights activist.
“Historically, the occupier of Palestine has always met disaster, beginning with the Jews themselves,” Barbara Tuchman begins. “The country’s political geography has conquered its rulers.”
James Agee suspects we are unworthy of reading his book, just as he suspects himself unworthy of writing it. He does not allow us to meet a single member of his families until a third of the way through.