"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.
Tom Bates drives about 10,000 kilometers a month. He has a few regular stops and warehouses between Kyiv, where donations arrive, and the Donetsk region in the east. “I travel around to Dnipro, along the Dnieper River, to Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Bakhmut when we could. There’s a lot of action on that eastern front.”
His wife says, "If Erden dies at sea, well, that’s always been a possibility. But if he doesn’t do it I wouldn’t want to live with him because he’d be miserable and obsessed in a different way." Eruc belongs to "the tribe of restless souls."
This dictionary is a collection of invented words defining emotions many of us may have experienced but never thought to define or thought could be defined — our obscure sorrows — by turns light-hearted or tragic, and always poignant.
“To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without which consideration, not much in U.S. history makes sense, unless Indigenous peoples are erased.”