A transcript of the Book Review podcast from Aug. 2, 2019. Carl Hulse talks about “Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington’s War Over the Supreme Court, from Scalia’s Death to Justice Kavanaugh,” and De’Shawn Charles Winslow discusses his debut novel, “In West Mills.”
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PAMELA PAUL: How has the Supreme Court nomination process changed since the death of Antonin Scalia? Carl Hulse will join us to talk about his new book, “Confirmation Bias.” And how do you imagine the life of someone who has figured into your childhood in fiction? De’Shawn Charles Winslow will tell us about his debut novel, “In West Mills.” Alexandra Alter will give us an update from the publishing world. Plus, our critics will talk about the latest in literary criticism. This is the Book Review Podcast for The New York Times. I’m Pamela Paul.
Carl Hulse joins us now. He is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times, and the author of a new book, “Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington’s War Over the Supreme Court From Scalia’s Death to Justice Kavanaugh.” Carl, thanks for being here.
CARL HULSE: Great to be here.
PAMELA PAUL: So, you are the chief Washington correspondent for The Times. What does that mean exactly?
CARL HULSE: Probably that I’ve been here a long time. I’ve been, in some capacities, with The Times since 1986. I had many positions. I started out as a reporter for the papers The Times owned around the country. I became an editor. I became chief congressional correspondent. I became the Washington editor and at the end of that, I think they were looking for something for me to do, so they said, “Now you’re the chief Washington correspondent.”
But I think I do a couple of things in that role. I write a lot about the intersection of Congress and the administration and politics from the perspective of somebody who’s been around for a long time. And I also sort of lend myself out to a lot of the other reporters around here to talk with them about how to do their stories and how to approach it, that sort of thing.
PAMELA PAUL: You also write a column called On Washington.
CARL HULSE: Correct.
PAMELA PAUL: How long have you been doing that? Did you originate it, or did you take it over from someone else? What do you try to do?
CARL HULSE: Dean Baquet, the editor, actually originated it. We were in a meeting one time when I think I was explaining something to folks. Like, here’s how things really work, and here’s why this is going to happen. And Dean said, “Let’s give Carl a column.” And so On Washington to me is a way to explain kind of the inner workings of things and why things that look like they shouldn’t be happening are happening or why things that aren’t happening, why they’re not happening. So it’s sort of the insider view.
PAMELA PAUL: You make sense of it all for the people who are not insiders. CARL HULSE: At least, I try to.
PAMELA PAUL: You’ve been reporting out of Washington, as you said, for more than three decades. You’ve seen a lot. Has your job changed significantly since 2016, or is it just sort of just the latest thing?
CARL HULSE: Yeah, I think it’s the latest thing. The changes in my job have been a lot about how we deliver the news and how quickly we do the news now compared to when I started here in 1986, which, at the time, we thought we were really going fast, but we go really fast now. But I think, obviously, the Trump administration has changed the way we do things. It’s very intense. There’s a lot of conflict with the people we’re reporting on. And it’s just go, go, go all the time.
PAMELA PAUL: Do you get jaded covering Washington politics?
CARL HULSE: I think some people would say I do. I try not to. I think it’s one of the most fascinating jobs in the world. And I always tell people — I worked in the Capitol for a long time, in the building itself, and live on Capitol Hill. And I’ve trained a lot of reporters in how to cover Congress. And I always say, the day you walk into the Capitol to work and you’re not thrilled by it and awed by it, it’s a day you need to find another job. So I try to keep a good perspective.
But there is a tendency when you see things happen over and over again and kind of go the wrong way politically, there is a tendency to be jaded. I tried to really avoid that. I love working here. I think it’s just extremely fascinating and important to tell people what’s going on in Washington.
PAMELA PAUL: Well, the book review version of that is when you start to refer to books as units, as opposed to books.
CARL HULSE: I can totally understand that.
PAMELA PAUL: That means your clock is ticking. But—
CARL HULSE: Yeah, that’s funny.
PAMELA PAUL: —you’ve done many things, as you explained, in your role in Washington and your various roles. But one of them has not been covering the Supreme Court directly.
CARL HULSE: Correct.
PAMELA PAUL: Why did you decide — this is your first book — why this subject?
CARL HULSE: Well, and the book is not. It’s about the politics around the Supreme Court. Adam Liptak, our great Supreme Court correspondent, who I give a fulsome shout out to in my acknowledgments, he really helped me a lot in this book. It’s about how these confirmations have gotten so out of control and partisan.
People say, oh, you’ve got a Kavanaugh book about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. I say, well, it’s about Kavanaugh, but to me, it’s much bigger than that. It’s about how we got here, and these confirmations, and what that has done to the Senate, and the process, and also the court itself, sort of the threat to the integrity of the court.
And another big element of this book is how the fight over Merrick Garland, who was stonewalled by Republicans in 2016, how that really helped Donald Trump get elected. I think a big part of my book is how that fight led to the election of Donald Trump. And I just thought it was a really — it was a history changing moment.
There was a decision made in 2016 by Mitch McConnell to thwart Obama on a Supreme Court vacancy, and it literally changed history. And I thought that was worth writing about. I’ve actually started the book and was probably a third or so through when Justice Kennedy retired. So I was going to write this book with or without the Kavanaugh fight.
PAMELA PAUL: You got a little bonus chapter there, or more than one.
CARL HULSE: Yeah, correct.
PAMELA PAUL: When people talk about politicization of the Supreme Court nomination process, generally speaking, they date it back, at least in the modern era, to Robert Bork’s failed—
CARL HULSE: Correct.
PAMELA PAUL: —nomination. And so you were there for that. Is this recent series of battles sort of part of that ongoing continuum?
CARL HULSE: It’s all a continuum. Yeah, that’s the perfect word. This has really started out even in the ’60s over Abe Fortas’ nomination to be Chief Justice. And it’s been going on and steadily building, and building, and building. And all these different events have happened to make things worse.
One thing that I really point out in the book I think is that both sides — and that’s part of the title, “Confirmation Bias”— both sides, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, progressives, feel they have been wronged in the confirmation fights. And there’s been this tit for tat series of changes and escalations. And we’ve gotten to the point where the process has just totally broken down. But you are able to confirm justices now with a simple majority. The minority party has little to do with it.
But the one I focus on is after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. And Democrats who were outraged by the Supreme Court, by the way, deciding that election began filibustering circuit court, appeals court nominees. And Miguel Estrada, who gets some attention in the book, about a chapter, is the first of these. And it’s this big fight over Miguel Estrada, and it led to more and more fights.
There were some little temporary reprieves, but in 2013, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, majority leader of the Senate, changed the rules to allow Obama to get some of his judges through on a majority vote. And things just built from there, where Senator McConnell blocked Merrick Garland.
And that led to Trump being able to really emphasize what he was going to do for the court to bring conservatives behind him, even though they had some qualms about him. Republicans have a tendency to vote more on the court than Democrats. And so this was a big benefit for Trump, as it turned out. Sort of accidental, but it did happen.
PAMELA PAUL: This sounds a little bit like the Arab-Israeli conflict in terms of who started it.
CARL HULSE: Correct, yeah. PAMELA PAUL: And it depends on who you’re talking to. And I want to go into those sort of two very different ways of viewing what went wrong, but let’s start with the unexpected death — I think it was pretty unexpected — of Antonin Scalia on February 12, 2016. What happened after that?
CARL HULSE: So he is down in Texas at a luxury hunting resort.
PAMELA PAUL: It’s very on brand.
CARL HULSE: Yeah, and very prominent guest there. He’s staying in the El Presidente suite. And he had been tired the night before, and the owner of the resort, who was close to Scalia, worried he didn’t show up for breakfast the next morning. They thought, oh, he’s just sleeping in, but they later found him dead. And that just set in motion this series of events that happened that day that really had a huge impact on our history.
And so word starts to get back to Washington that the justice is dead, and everybody starts to maneuver around it. I like to say that in these situations, there’s usually this little period where politicians kind of pretend to be mourning a person, and let’s not talk about the politics of this. We need to honor the person first. That didn’t happen in this case. The politics immediately kicked in because the stakes were so high.
And Mitch McConnell is down in the Caribbean, of all places. The Senate’s in recess for Presidents’ Day. Mitch McConnell and his wife had gone down to the Caribbean, and I poke a little fun at Senator McConnell in there because he’s not a guy you think about hanging out at the beach. He’s just not that kind of person.
But he decides that he’s a real — he idolizes Scalia and knew him quite well, himself had voted for him. He’s not going to let Barack Obama, a president that Mr. McConnell has little regard for, he’s not going to let him fill this seat and get a third justice on the court. And so things start to happen very rapidly, and one of Senator McConnell’s aides gets on the phone.
And an important thing to know here is that there’s a Republican presidential primary debate that night in South Carolina. Trump hasn’t quite nailed down the nomination yet. Ted Cruz is still in the mix. And so one of Senator McConnell’s aides said, if you’re going to prevent President Obama from doing this, you need to act fast because if Ted Cruz, at this debate tonight, becomes the person who is leading the charge not to fill this vacancy, we’re going to lose a lot of Republicans who don’t want to be seen doing Ted Cruz’s bidding honestly.
So at about 6 o’clock that night, we get a press release from Senator McConnell, saying, I’m not going to let the president fill this, and we’ll let the next president do it. It was a stunner to all of us. We’re sitting in our various places, trying to keep track of this. And all of us just went, whoa, that was really fast. And so things just started to spiral from there.
PAMELA PAUL: How unprecedented was that, the idea that you could not even bring a nominee, sort of allow the process to take place because it was an election year?
CARL HULSE: The thing with Supreme Court vacancies is they just don’t happen very often. So there’s not a lot of history. There had been in 1988 a vote to install Anthony Kennedy on the court when it was a Democratic Senate and a Republican president. So it had happened before. The situation just hadn’t arisen very often. So but Senator McConnell, he was making up the rules there as he went along. And he was going to stick to it. So it was unprecedented. To not even entertain a nominee, that was shocking. PAMELA PAUL: This election of Merrick Garland, one of the criticisms from the left is this was a guy who was kind of unimpeachable. He was a moderate. And one of the criticisms that seems of Democratic presidents from the left is it’s not like Obama had picked out someone radical from the far left for the court. This was someone who it was very reasonable to expect confirmation to be quick and seamless.
CARL HULSE: The whole point of President Obama nominating him was that Republicans in the past had indicated they would be open to a guy like Merrick Garland in 2010 when Obama went in a different direction. But Senator Orrin Hatch, a big player on the Judiciary Committee, had said, well, bring us someone like Merrick Garland who is considered a moderate, compared to other potential Democratic nominees.
But to Mitch McConnell, it really didn’t matter who Obama was going to nominate. He was just determined to block anybody. In fact, Senator McConnell was like, don’t even send us a nominee because we don’t care who it is. He didn’t want it to become about Merrick Garland.
PAMELA PAUL: Right, they wanted it to be about the process, not the person.
CARL HULSE: Right. But the White House, they’re kind of shocked by McConnell’s decision. And they were having a meeting, and we’re going to go through this process. Obama wanted to do this the proper way.
And Ron Klain, an outside adviser, had done a lot of Supreme Court nominations previously and worked for then Senator Biden. He encouraged the White House at that time, like, don’t waste time. Just nominate Merrick Garland right now. You know you’re going to end up with him. Just go ahead, and then don’t let the Republican position get established.
But they didn’t do that. They went through the usual interview process and didn’t nominate Garland until about a month after Justice Scalia died. And the Republicans had gotten themselves pretty set by that point.
PAMELA PAUL: Was this party line and this official reasoning behind McConnell’s decision, was this accepted unanimously by Republicans? And did they talk about it at all in private differently?
CARL HULSE: Actually, it wasn’t unanimous. Susan Collins was one who was saying, well, we should at least have the hearings and a vote. But almost everybody else got on board very quickly. Now McConnell made the decision on his own. He didn’t consult with people. He just pulled the trigger. But by the time everyone got back and the Republicans — and over the remaining about 10 days of the recess, they came together and decided this was the proper position. And they really stuck to it.
And I outlined in the book the Democratic failures to sort of break this logjam. They tried a few things. They didn’t have a lot of money. And overlaying this whole fight over Merrick Garland was the fact that both sides simply thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.
PAMELA PAUL: Right, so that this was the kind of last chance.
CARL HULSE: Yeah, and but it was a temporary postponement. Even the Republicans were saying, well, Hillary Clinton’s going to win. You’ll be able to get who you want then. The Democrats are like—
PAMELA PAUL: So what’s in it for the Republicans in making this move if they assume that it’s not really going to have any effect, and it’s going to set a precedent that might then ricochet back in their face? CARL HULSE: They’re appeasing the right. They need to show the right that they’re not going to cave to Obama. And this was important for Mitch McConnell because in spite what people think about Mitch McConnell on the left, that he is the arch villain in Washington, the right is sometimes suspicious of Mitch McConnell because they see him as a deal maker, someone who’s willing to cave at some point. So McConnell is trying to assure the right. He’s like, look, I’m doing everything I can to prevent President Obama from filling this. And that gets him and his party the support of the right.
And no one thought it, even right up to election night. The conventional thinking in Washington was that Hillary Clinton’s going to be elected president. Democrats are going to win the Senate. And we’ll see what goes on there. And then as it turned out, this vacancy gave Republicans a rallying cry, and they won that night, to the surprise of Mitch McConnell, but also to the great glee of Mitch McConnell because now he gets to fill the Supreme Court seat and also take care of filling scores of other judicial vacancies.
PAMELA PAUL: Right. Well, it’s interesting you say he gets to fill. Of course it’s Trump who makes the nomination. But he had not been secret, Donald Trump, about what his plans were for the Supreme Court. What kind of promises did he make on the campaign trail?
CARL HULSE: So this is a big part of Donald Trump’s election. And I go into it in quite a detail in the book, the famous list. Because conservatives were also leery of Donald Trump. He had been a Democrat at some point in his life. Hard to remember now, but there was some real fear that he might get in office if he were elected and really work with the Democrats.
And to sort of allay some of those fears, Donald Trump and Don McGahn, his campaign attorney who later became the White House counsel, they did this very unique thing where they said let’s get some names of people we would actually put on the Supreme Court, get them out in public, and let conservatives see. And we’ll commit to naming people from this list.
And in the book, I talk a lot about how it kind of came together and some of the surprises along the way. But it was a big help. Oddly, though, the two people he ended up naming to the court weren’t on the original list. The list went through some different iterations as things changed along the way. And there was some maneuvering to get people on to that list.
PAMELA PAUL: How involved was the Federalist Society in coming up with that list and finalizing it?
CARL HULSE: Federalist Society and also the Heritage Foundation, these two pretty big conservative think tank organizations here — the Federalist Society dated back to the ’80s when conservatives were worried they wanted to get some more of their people onto the Court. And so in some ways, the genesis of the idea of the list came directly from Trump who knew that he needed to get some names out there.
So they brought in Leonard Leo, who was the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, later on and said, hey, we’re going to do this. And he said, well, no one’s ever done it before, but we’ll help you. So yeah, in providing the names, and doing the research, and checking the opinions, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation were very instrumental.
But I have to say, the names of these people are pretty well known in judicial circles. They’re close knit. It’s kind of a clubby group. So there’s only a certain number of people that would even be eligible to get on this list, but they did put it in.
Don McGahn, when he first started doing this, he thought this was going to be a private list that they circulated amongst themselves. And he’s at a meeting, the first meeting where Trump met with Leonard Leo, and Trump says, well, let’s make this thing public. And McGahn was quite shocked by that at the time. But it ended up working out for Trump. It was a big help.
PAMELA PAUL: How did he finalize his first nomination, Donald Trump?
CARL HULSE: The thing about Don McGahn, Leonard Leo, and people in the Federalist Society is they are focused right now on what we call deconstructing the administrative state. They want to tear down the power of the federal bureaucracy. So they went looking for people who had written strong opinions on that. Neil Gorsuch, who became the first nominee, was someone who had written and made some rulings directly on this subject. And he really caught the attention of McGahn and Leonard Leo.
And but Don was also always interested in Brett Kavanaugh. Don McGahn knew Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh had sworn down in as when Don was put on the Federal Election Commission. So Don liked Brett Kavanaugh, too. But I don’t think they wanted to go. Brett Kavanaugh was a real Washington figure at that time. And they wanted to reach outside Washington.
Neil Gorsuch was a federal appeals court judge in Colorado. His mother had been the head of the EPA. And the Reagan administration actually had a bad scandal that happened under her. So he was out there. So they really moved toward Neil Gorsuch because of his opinions and his position that the federal bureaucracy needed to be weakened.
PAMELA PAUL: It’s very tempting to go into all the detail about Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. We don’t have time to do that. A lot of that is in the book, so I will leave that for readers. But I want to talk about the larger themes of your book and what these precedents mean moving forward in terms of how the process takes place the next time around, whether it’s under Donald Trump or under another president. Are the changes that have happened here, are they irreversible? Is this permanent?
CARL HULSE: I mean, this is a question I get a lot. And it’s hard to see where they are reversible because it would mean a party giving up power. The biggest thing that had happened was the Democrats had eliminated the filibuster against nominees, except for Supreme Court nominees. When Democrats tried to filibuster Neil Gorsuch, Mitch McConnell eliminated that last step. So now you can install a Supreme Court justice simply by through the majority.
Now, it’s always been a majority vote. But the threat of a filibuster forced the president at that time to try and find somebody who could at least get some votes from the other side to make sure they could get through. That is gone now. One side can put through a justice on their own. And I just think that for someone to go back and say, hey, let’s go back to where we were, that’s just not going to happen. So it just gets more and more partisan and polarized.
And one of the reasons the courts are so important now is because our politics and our legislature is so polarized. So all these fights, and you see this right now with President Trump. Tons of these issues are in the courts. So getting people on the courts, one party or the other, who you think are going to be more aligned with you has become very, very important. And it’s really to me testing our institutions right now, and how they’re going to deal with this challenge, and going forward. Or is the whole thing just going to break down?
PAMELA PAUL: The argument on the left or among the Democrats is very familiar, I think, probably to our listeners because they’ve been the party out of power that has complained about this process. But as you pointed out, there are two sides here. Both feel that the other has started it. Both feel wronged. Explain to us what the Republican point of view is. Why did they feel justified in making these changes to the confirmation process?
CARL HULSE: Because it had been done to them from their view. Bork is part of this. The changing of the rules is part of this. They thought that Democrats had been very heavy handed in pushing aside the rights of the minority. So they sat there and said, we can block Merrick Garland. The Democrats treated us badly. And that’s basically it.
But also, they were looking for a rationale to do that. They did not want President Obama to get another justice on the court. That would have changed the entire ideological balance of the court. That was going to be a very big decision.
And the Republicans, they look at Obama as they had already thwarted him legislatively for years. So he was starting to rely on executive orders that we’re very familiar with now, for the DREAMers, that sort of thing. So they didn’t want him now to be able to get a court in place that could uphold those policies that he was putting through executive order. So they thought they had been wronged, but they were also looking for a way to stop Obama.
PAMELA PAUL: And so should there be a vacancy on the court in early 2020, they will then have to confront the idea that McConnell’s bet will not somehow fly back in their face.
CARL HULSE: Yeah, and Senator McConnell has already pretty much said that he would go forward. And he says, well, I did that when it was the Senate of one party and the presidency of another. That’s a different situation. At the time, no one’s talked about this party division very much. It was let the people decide.
But if there is a vacancy next year, you can be very sure that Mitch McConnell would go ahead and certainly try and fill it before the election because there’s a chance Trump could not be re-elected. But if he could get another justice on the court, if it was, say, one of the four remaining liberals who left, that would really give them an overpowering majority on the court.
PAMELA PAUL: All right, there’s much more to say on this subject, and you write about it in your book. Before I let you go, I want to ask you one unrelated question. As a journalist, you know this and I know this. Never trust Wikipedia, especially Wikipedia biographies. However, your bio had one interesting fact that I am wondering if you can confirm or deny, which is that outside your work, in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, you play the maracas, among other percussion instruments.
CARL HULSE: I’m actually a drummer in a garage band on Capitol Hill. We play some gigs. The maraca reference is funny because another — actually, a book party for Mark Leibovich years ago, he asked us to write a song about his book, This Town, and we didn’t. We didn’t bring the whole band, so I just had maracas. But yes, I am a pretty mediocre drummer, but able to play in public.
PAMELA PAUL: All right. Well, I’m assuming that’s not in the book, but there is a lot else. Carl, thank you so much for being here.
CARL HULSE: Yes, thank you for having me. This is a complex topic, but I tried to make a really readable book about this. And the feedback I’ve gotten is that from people who don’t even really pay that close attention, they were able to understand this. So I think people find it a good read.
PAMELA PAUL: Excellent. Carl, thanks again.
CARL HULSE: Thank you.
PAMELA PAUL: Carl Hulse is the author of “Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington’s War Over the Supreme Court from Scalia’s Death to Justice Kavanaugh.”
So here’s a request for our listeners. I get lots of feedback from you, some complaints, lots of kind words. Really appreciate it. You can always reach me directly at [email protected]. I will write back. But you can also, if you feel moved to do so, review us on any platform where you download the podcast, whether that’s iTunes, or Stitcher, or Google Play, or somewhere else. Please feel free to review us, and of course, email us at anytime.
Joining us now is Elizabeth Flock. She is a producer at the PBS News Hour, which is our partner on the Now Read This book club. Liz is joining us, alas, from the road by phone to talk a little bit about what we’ll be reading this August. Liz, thanks for being here.
ELIZABETH FLOCK: Thanks for having me.
PAMELA PAUL: So let’s talk about what our book choice is going to be for August now that we have finished reading House of Broken Angels.
ELIZABETH FLOCK: Well, we’re doing something a little different for August. Normally, our staff and yours gets together to pick our monthly book club pick. But this month, we decided, since many people in the summer months go back to a classic, something that they love to read and reread, we asked a best-selling author today to choose one of her favorite classics for us to read.
And so we turn to Celeste Ng, a best-selling novelist, of “Little Fires Everywhere” and we asked her, what is a classic you often go back to in the summer? And she said, I would like to choose Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, “The Woman Warrior.” So that is our August pick.
PAMELA PAUL: Excellent. Yes, I feel like it’s our equivalent of Meghan Markle guest editing British Vogue.
ELIZABETH FLOCK: Yes, exactly.
PAMELA PAUL: We have Celeste Ng as our guest book club hostess, or chooser, for this month. And I was really excited about her selecting the Maxine Hong Kingston, which was originally published in 1976. Because critics here at The New York Times had selected that book number two of the best 50 memoirs of the last 50 years. So this is a book that we have been recently thinking about ourselves over here. Did Celeste talk about why she picked this particular novel?
ELIZABETH FLOCK: She did. She said that for many years, “The Woman Warrior” was one of the few places that Chinese-American women could really see their own experiences reflected in American literature, that there weren’t a lot of places that you could see that. But even now, 40 years after it was published, that it remained pretty deeply relevant to her, to a lot of questions around immigration and inclusion that we’re grappling with today. And she felt that it was just as timely now as ever.
PAMELA PAUL: All right. Well, that fits the mission of Now Read This, which is to look at books that are covering themes or touching on issues that are resonating somewhere in the news in this country. And I imagine that Celeste may also, not only as a reader, have felt Maxine Hong Kingston’s influence, but also as a novelist herself in her two books, “Little Fires Everywhere” and “Everything I Never Told You.” So how do listeners of this podcast who may not be members of the book club, how do they join the book club? How do they get to be part of this conversation?
ELIZABETH FLOCK: You can either join our Facebook group online that has about 70,000 members. It’s just, look up Now Read This on Facebook, and you’ll be sent right there. Or you can join our newsletter if you don’t do Facebook, which is just bit.ly/nowreadthisnewsletter.
PAMELA PAUL: All right. Liz, thanks so much for being here.
ELIZABETH FLOCK: Thanks for having me.
PAMELA PAUL: Elizabeth Flock is a producer at the PBS News Hour and our partner on Now Read This, our monthly book club.
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PAMELA PAUL: Alexandra Alter joins us now to talk about what’s going on in the publishing world. Hi Alexandra.
ALEXANDRA ALTER: Hi Pamela.
PAMELA PAUL: What is going on?
ALEXANDRA ALTER: So there was a bit of an outcry this week over a book by Yuval Noah Harari. He is, of course, the famous author of “Sapiens.” And this was a translation of his recent book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century,” in Russian. The reason this controversy emerged is because there was a reader in the Ukraine who was reading a hard copy of the book in Ukrainian, but he switched to the Russian e-book version and he noticed major discrepancies in how these two different versions described Russia’s actions in Crimea, where it has been very aggressive.
In particular, there were big changes to a chapter about post-truth, where Mr. Harari was using an English version, and in the Ukrainian version, Putin as an example of somebody who had misled the public about his actions, particularly when it comes to what he’d done in Crimea, and essentially denying the facts on the ground that everyone could see plainly and when it came to Russian military activity in Crimea.
So this emerged. And it was interesting. I spoke to Mr. Harari about it. He wasn’t entirely blindsided. I think a lot of times when things like this happen, for example, with publishers in China, authors aren’t even aware of the changes that are made to the text because they’re not reading the Chinese edition. They sell the translation rights, and they sort of never follow up. And it only really comes out if a reader is a student of it to notice the differences. PAMELA PAUL: One of the things I thought was interesting is that the chapter on the Crimea was replaced that was about, really, Putin. And the Crimean post-truth was replaced with a chapter in analyzing a speech by Donald Trump.
ALEXANDRA ALTER: Interesting, yeah. I thought that was interesting, too. So when I spoke to Harari about it, he said he had agreed to those changes. And he said he felt like he was replacing that true example with another true example. He wasn’t saying anything that was false.
And he felt like it was worth compromising because it was a way to reach Russian readers who, if he didn’t make this change, wouldn’t have access to the book. And he felt like the book overall is very critical of authoritarian regimes, critical of homophobia, of dictatorship, of any effort to crush freedom of speech. So he felt like those messages overall were important ones to spread in a country where there isn’t exactly freedom of the press or freedom of expression.
On the other hand, he was troubled to learn that there were changes that he didn’t approve of or know of. A significant one that he felt very strongly about was there was a change to the dedication of the book where he refers to his husband. In the Russian edition, they changed it to partner. And he said that was very upsetting to him. He’s openly gay. It’s something he speaks about when he travels around the world, and that was something he hadn’t approved of.
There was a similar change to a book by Andrew Solomon, “The Noonday Demon.” In the Chinese translation, they explicitly cut references that he made to being gay, even though he had a contract that said that he had approval over any changes. So I spoke to him about this years ago for a story that I wrote about the Chinese publishing industry and efforts to increase translations and exchanges between the US and Chinese publishing industries.
And at the time, he was very upset about it. He’d only learned about it because Penn had done a study of translations. And since then, he’s rescinded translation rights, and he’s commissioned another Chinese translation, which will include those references that were cut.
PAMELA PAUL: Is this common with translations in Russia and in China in particular?
ALEXANDRA ALTER: You know, those are the two examples that I’ve heard of and that came up with Penn. I do wonder about other translations. If you’re trying to get your book published in a country where certain issues are taboo, I could imagine other changes occurring. But it’s a very hard thing to track because it would involve a bilingual reader sort of reading both copies.
And I think the reason that this really caught everyone’s attention is because Mr. Harari is a very famous author. He’s beloved by tech gurus in the US, and he has a huge platform. And it was such an egregious change, particularly for a Ukrainian who said he had witnessed some of these military activities, and aggression, and the trauma that it had caused. And so to see that difference between those two texts as he was switching between them was really staggering.
PAMELA PAUL: So is there any action being taken?
ALEXANDRA ALTER: So the last time I spoke to Mr. Harari, he said he was going to reach out to his Russian publisher. The Russian publisher is Sindbad. They declined to comment for the story. They said that their main editor was away and wasn’t available to comment for several weeks. Mr. Harari said he would reach out to them, and get more information, and hopefully make some fixes to the next edition if he can.
PAMELA PAUL: All right. Thanks so much, Alexandra.
ALEXANDRA ALTER: Thanks for having me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PAMELA PAUL: De’Shawn Charles Winslow joins us now. He has a new novel, his debut, “In West Mills.” De’Shawn, thanks for being here.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Hi. Thanks for having me.
PAMELA PAUL: Tell us about the setting for your novel, West Mills, and why you included it in the title.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: West Mills is based on a real town called South Mills, North Carolina. And it’s the town where my mother and her siblings were born and raised. And it’s a very special town to me, even though I grew up in the neighboring city of Elizabeth City. And I thought that naming the book after the fictional town would be the right choice because the characters leave. They come back. Most of the novel happens there in the town. The town is almost a character. And so that’s why I wanted to go with that title.
PAMELA PAUL: Why is that town special to you, the fictional town on which it’s based?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: The fictional town is special because the sense of community there is very, very strong because the population was small. I think it’s still about the same, maybe 1,000 people now.
PAMELA PAUL: Oh, very small.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Very small. And that sense of community just was always special to me.
PAMELA PAUL: You were inspired to write this book, you’ve said, by the death of your father, which prompted you to look into family history.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Right.
PAMELA PAUL: How much of your family history did you know before you started to do that research?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I knew the names of my great-grandparents, and great-aunts, and that sort of thing. But I had to do my own research genealogy to go deeper and to find out where we had come from, which turns out to have been North Carolina.
PAMELA PAUL: You were there how long?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: As far back as I was able to trace, the early 1800s.
PAMELA PAUL: Wow.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Everyone had been born there, if documents were correct. PAMELA PAUL: Was the research difficult? Were there holes missing?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Surprisingly, not a lot. I mean, it did reach a point where, because in that county — well, both of my parents were from different counties, and one county went back a little further than the other. So I did hit a point where I couldn’t go any further. But I didn’t really find many holes. I kind of thought I would. It was pretty streamlined.
PAMELA PAUL: Did you begin that family history research because of not knowing your father that well or not knowing that much about him?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Well, I knew my father. He and my mother raised me. But I didn’t know much about his lineage, other than his parents and his grandparents. That was it. And so, again, I was just curious about had we all been born in North Carolina? Had anyone come from maybe the Caribbean at some point?
PAMELA PAUL: What inspired you to turn to fiction then to write about that history, which in a way you did, even though your characters are not related to you?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I couldn’t get a hold of a lot of facts in terms of people’s personalities, and their likes, and dislikes. And I turned to fiction because it allowed me to be able to make it up based on what little I did know about maybe, like, the work they did, and that sort of thing.
PAMELA PAUL: No one kept diaries or anything like that.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Right.
PAMELA PAUL: And the person that you chose to center this novel on, Azalea Knot Centre, as it happens, she is not part of your family, but she’s based on someone that you actually knew growing up. Who was the real person, Knot?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Correct. The real person, her name was Bertha. And she was the girlfriend of a great-uncle, one of my great-uncles. And the two of them had a very loving relationship. Alcohol played a big part in their connection, sadly. But she was well respected throughout the community, in my family. Just recently saw a great photo of her with my great-grandmother — well, my great- grandmother was in the background. So that said to me that even my great-grandmother sanctioned their union.
PAMELA PAUL: Who is the fictional Knot Centre?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Knot Centre is a woman who was born into a middle-class black family, which was highly unusual during that time. And she was an alcoholic and a teacher. And she hated teaching. She loved alcohol. She loved men on her own terms. But she did not want to conform to anything, quote, “normal.” She did not want to marry. She did not want to be a mother. And a lot of that stuff tries to impose itself on her.
PAMELA PAUL: The novel goes from the 1940s to the 1980s.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Correct. PAMELA PAUL: How unusual was it for a woman like Knot Centre not to want to marry at that time?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Well, my research suggests that it wasn’t all that uncommon, but that most women just did it. They just said, I can’t deal with this fight. I don’t want to be the outcast. I’m going to marry the man, and I’m going to have his children and do all that stuff all the other women are doing, but that it was very common for them to not have wanted to.
PAMELA PAUL: Her alcoholism, while it’s part of the novel, it’s sort of, it’s not the point. This is not the sort of trajectory, the typical story of an alcoholic that we read. Why did you want to make that part of the story, but not have it be the point?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I wanted to show that a person can have some sort of addiction that sets them out, sets them aside from the rest of the community, but that that problem doesn’t inform all of their life. And that’s why I had Knot be intelligent, a reader, and a bit of a snooty reader. Like, she only likes European literature.
PAMELA PAUL: So you couldn’t just sort of write her off as an alcoholic in this.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Exactly. Yes, that’s what I wanted. I wanted people to not be able just say she’s a standard alcoholic.
PAMELA PAUL: It seems like you were trying to avoid stereotyping of all kinds—
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I was.
PAMELA PAUL: —in creating your characters.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: As an African-American writer, I did not want to make the character stuck in any way. I wanted all of them to be as individual and unique as possible. And there are some things that happened in the novel that some people could easily label stereotypical, like fighting. But all people fight. And the fact is that these things still happen today. It’s still relevant.
PAMELA PAUL: What has the reaction to the novel been among people in your family and in that community who surely recognize some of this as being about them or about that community in that time?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I haven’t received a lot of detailed feedback yet. So far, it’s just been a lot of excitement around having a book that reflects something that they are familiar with. I’m doing a hometown reading in September, and I imagine that’s when the conversations will start.
PAMELA PAUL: Are you nervous about it?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I’m a little nervous.
PAMELA PAUL: What about among your family members? Do they have any sort of trepidation, thinking, well, it’s obviously not us, but a little bit based around us and our community?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Not yet.
PAMELA PAUL: All right. DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Not yet.
PAMELA PAUL: OK.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I’ve been fortunate.
PAMELA PAUL: We’ll keep fingers crossed. You also chose to write about — have a woman at the center of your novel, as opposed to you’re not a woman. Did you have any trepidation around taking on that voice and that point of view?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Yes, I was afraid to do it because appropriation in different forms, it happens a lot these days, and I did not want to be added to that list. But I essentially had no choice. Women raised me. Like I said, I had a father in the home. But women, my mother, and my aunts, and the women in the neighborhood, they taught me everything I know about life.
And I’m gay, and I think as soon as the men started to pick up on that, they politely excused me or sent me to be with the women. I didn’t have a straight male voice, really, to work with, or at least, not one that I felt confident in trying to pull off like a whole novel.
PAMELA PAUL: Did that personal experience of your own make you want to write about someone who’s also a little bit of an outsider?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Absolutely. And I don’t think I realized that while I was writing it. I think after I finished, I was like, oh, she and I have something in common.
PAMELA PAUL: That’s so interesting.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Yeah.
PAMELA PAUL: Do you think West Mills, this fictional town, is this your setting? Do you think writing another novel in the same place?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Yes. I’m working on the second novel, and it is also set in West Mills. I think eventually I may leave West Mills. But I think I don’t see myself writing, like, the New York City story. But who knows?
PAMELA PAUL: Well, you only just got here. We can’t quite expect that yet.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Well, I lived here a long time before I left, but I’m such a Southerner at heart, you know?
PAMELA PAUL: Do you think that the black Southern experience is well represented in contemporary fiction?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I don’t see as much of it as I would like.
PAMELA PAUL: Who do you like to read, or who do you think’s done it well?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I recently read Chanelle Benz’s The Gone Dead, and I thought that was done really well. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s book, although the setting is not declared to be New Orleans, I think it’s implied, and I think that was done really well, the way the characters speak and the things they are concerned with. And in terms of older literature, Alice Walker, of course, and Toni Morrison, although I don’t know that much of her work is set in the South, but Ohio, that sort of environment. I love those works.
PAMELA PAUL: When you think about — and here, I’m going to generalize about readers and what they are getting in terms of what’s available — what do you think is the most common misperception about the Southern black experience that you might get if you only read, let’s say, nonfiction or news stories and didn’t really know the literature well?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: I think the common misconception of Southern people is that we are not as educated and that we are stuck in the past, especially where race concerns are. And I do think some of that is true, in terms of the social stuff. But people from the South go to college, read, keep up on news and current affairs, just like people in other parts of the country.
PAMELA PAUL: Why did you choose to set this novel in West Mills in that period from the 1940s to the 1980s as opposed to, say, today in the quote, unquote, “New South?”
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Largely because I love historical fiction, and I would have had trouble trying to write a novel set in, like, the 2000s when cellphones and stuff exist. Because I want characters to be able to go — I want them to have to go and talk to each other face-to-face, you know? I wanted to avoid technology as much as possible, but also to be able to place Knot in a time where being unconventional would have riled people up.
PAMELA PAUL: That’s so interesting how technology is a real deciding factor in terms of setting.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Absolutely.
PAMELA PAUL: —for lots of writers. Is your next novel, also in West Mills, in the same time period, or are you moving around a little?
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: It’s a little later. It’s going to be set in 1979.
PAMELA PAUL: Before we go, would you read for us from a section of “In West Mills”? Just give us a little bit of the sense of setting where you are in the novel.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Certainly. I’m going to be reading from the opening of the novel.
“In October of ’41, Azalea Center’s man told her he was sick and tired of West Mills and the love affair she was having with moonshine. Azalea — everyone called her Knot — reminded him that she was a grown woman. ‘Stop telling me how old you is,’ Pratt said. ‘Well, I thought maybe you forgot,’ Knot retorted.
She was sitting at her kitchen table, pulling bobby pins from her copper red hair. She picked up her glass and finished what was left in it. She had barely set it back on the table when Pratt picked it up and threw it against the wall. He then packed all his clothes in the old suitcase he’d brought when he moved into her house a few years back.
‘I’m getting out of here,’ he affirmed. ‘You need some help packing?’ Knot shot back, and she laughed. It wasn’t the first time Pratt had packed that ragged bag. He stared at her, frowning. ‘Drink yourself to death if that’s what you want to do.’ ‘Go to hell, Pratt.’ ‘I’m leaving hell!’ he yelled. A few days later, Knot came home and found a folded note peeping out from under her door. First she looked down at the signature. When she saw Pratt Shepherd signed at the bottom, she took a chilled glass from her icebox, poured a drink, and sat down to look over the message. She read most of it. It said that Pratt was at his sister’s house just across the lane. Knot wasn’t surprised. Pratt’s sister and her two little girls were the only family he had left in West Mills.”
PAMELA PAUL: All right. De’Shawn, thanks so much for being here.
DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW: Thanks for having me.
PAMELA PAUL: De’Shawn Charles Winslow is the author of In West Mills.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Joining us now are critics Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai, and Parul Sehgal. Hey guys.
ALL: Hi, Pamela.
PAMELA PAUL: All right, let’s start with you, Parul. What did you review this week?
PARUL SEHGAL: I reviewed a book called “Semicolon,” by Cecilia Watson. And this book sort of falls into my sweet spot, which is slender books about aspects of language and punctuation. And despite its size, it’s a really deep and interesting look at why the semicolon has always given people such anxiety, why it’s made writers so angry. And it looks at the evolution of the punctuation, which is a fairly young mark. And for most of its—
PAMELA PAUL: When was it born?
PARUL SEHGAL: In the 15th century, so 1492, I think. But it didn’t really have a function. And then slowly, as grammar became more and more codified, largely because grammarians wanted to justify their presence in schools and teach it, so they borrowed from the natural sciences. That’s why diagramming sentences is a thing. They wanted to sort of associate it with laws and rules. And then the semicolon was given two primary functions, which have driven writers crazy and students crazy.
And so she wants to look at why it bothers people, and then also the beauty of this mark, this technique which allows Melville to write “Moby-Dick” and Wolff to write “To The Lighthouse.” This technique, which allows writers to really create these beautiful long, sonorous, enveloping paragraphs.
PAMELA PAUL: Can we put our cards on the table here for a moment? O.K., does semicolon — and already, I’ve staked a claim here because others here believe it’s semicolon. I don’t really know. But pro or con, Dwight?
DWIGHT GARNER: In terms of pronunciation?
PAMELA PAUL: No, in terms of usage.
PARUL SEHGAL: Usage.
DWIGHT GARNER: Oh, I use it all — it’s my favorite. PARUL SEHGAL: Yeah, it’s my favorite.
DWIGHT GARNER: Parul has a great line in her review. She says something like, what, what do you say? 90% of style—
PARUL SEHGAL: Style is punctuation.
DWIGHT GARNER: —is punctuation, which is a great line. I might say 80, but I get it. And I think learning how to deploy a semicolon, when I first learned how to do it well, was a change in my style absolutely. And there are plenty of people. I remember Michael Kinsley, when he edited the New Republic and then Slate, was really opposed. He said—
PAMELA PAUL: But why?
DWIGHT GARNER: He said—
PARUL SEHGAL: Because it was fussy.
DWIGHT GARNER: [INAUDIBLE]
PARUL SEHGAL: Yeah, pretentious.
JENNIFER SZALAI: It’s snobby.
PAMELA PAUL: Oh, that’s why it’s not a problem for us.
PARUL SEHGAL: But then there’s also this idea, especially in American prose, which sentences should be short, and muscular, and clean, and direct, and anything else is frou-frou and sissified.
PAMELA PAUL: Sissified. I love the gendered question that comes into all of this.
PARUL SEHGAL: Yeah, but it allows for shading. And I think I also write in the reviews that semicolons also allow for certain kind of thought. You let one sentence bleed into another and ripen, and sort of twist it, and get deeper into it. So there are all kinds of, I think, psychological effects it creates in the mind of the reader.
PAMELA PAUL: Jen, you’re Canadian. How do you feel?
JENNIFER SZALAI: About the semicolon?
PAMELA PAUL: Yes.
PARUL SEHGAL: How do your people feel?
PAMELA PAUL: Versus the muscular Americans who are so opposed.
JENNIFER SZALAI: Yeah, we don’t care so much about muscular American stuff. I really like the semicolon. And I remember when Michael Kinsley was really against it, I remember the Kurt Vonnegut quote saying that before and not really understanding what all the anxiety was about.
PARUL SEHGAL: Yeah, the Vonnegut quote, just for context, is “it only exists to show people that you’ve been to college.” JENNIFER SZALAI: Right. Exactly, yeah.
DWIGHT GARNER: And it’s like this first toy. I mean, all the other bits of punctuation are pretty standard. They’re clunky shoes. And here comes this thing that’s really stylish. And it’s like this first really stylish—
PARUL SEHGAL: But you don’t need. Absolutely.
DWIGHT GARNER: You don’t really need it, and so—
PAMELA PAUL: But you do need it after a while. As long as we’re here, shall we say something about the em dash?
PARUL SEHGAL: Oh, gosh. I love the em dash. I’m addicted to the em dash. John will tell you how many em dashes he has to clean up from my—
PAMELA PAUL: Well, I confess that I was prompted to that question by a certain editor of yours.
PARUL SEHGAL: Oh, really, about my love of the em dash?
PAMELA PAUL: Yes.
PARUL SEHGAL: I love the em dash.
DWIGHT GARNER: I love it, too. And when I first started working at The Times, The Times was pretty opposed to it. I had most of my em dashes stripped out for most of the early parts of my career. I took a lot out as an editor because that was just the how style. I think they’re loosening up a bit more, would you say, Pamela?
PAMELA PAUL: I would say. I would say.
DWIGHT GARNER: Thank you for saying. I’m about to get more in myself.
PARUL SEHGAL: What marks do you guys overuse? Or tics, what are your tics?
DWIGHT GARNER: You, Jen.
JENNIFER SZALAI: I mean, I do think that I tend to lean pretty heavily on the semicolon, just because it’s so versatile. I mean, I think it feels like I can use it anywhere, which is definitely not the case. And I do like an em dash, two em dashes. But yeah, probably both of those marks would be my favorite.
PAMELA PAUL: Have you guys fallen victim to the overuse of the exclamation point, not in things that you’re writing for The New York Times, but in correspondence? Because I—
JENNIFER SZALAI: Like emails.
PAMELA PAUL: Yeah.
DWIGHT GARNER: Oh, yeah. You have to use it.
JENNIFER SZALAI: Otherwise people think you’re mad. PAMELA PAUL: You sound like a jerk if you don’t. You cannot say thank you with a period. It’s obviously sarcastic.
PARUL SEHGAL: Or you can elongate the U — thank you with, like, thousands of U’s.
PAMELA PAUL: Yeah, you have to—
PARUL SEHGAL: Excessively.
DWIGHT GARNER: Tom Wolfe would have been so happy. We’re all writing like he is now, or like he did.
PARUL SEHGAL: Jen, what did you review this week?
JENNIFER SZALAI: So this week, I reviewed a book called “Gods of the Upper Air,” by Charles King, who’s a professor at Georgetown. And it’s a book that’s essentially a group portrait of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his circle, or really focusing on a few women who were part of his circle, the women that he taught. And Franz Boas was born in Germany in the mid 1800s. And then he came to the United States, and he had a hard time finding a job, but eventually, he settled at Columbia.
And he really trained a new generation of anthropologists to resist what was considered mainstream science at the time, which essentially supported programs like eugenics, white supremacy, using measurements to argue that certain races were superior or inferior to one another.
The overall argument of this book is essentially that Boas and the people that he taught and worked with, like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, that they all really introduced this notion of cultural relativity into our understanding of different cultures, which, as we see now in our current moment, it’s still a notion that I think a lot of people struggle with. But how this sort of group of people working at a time when the mainstream science was totally inhospitable to their ideas, how they really sort of changed our understanding of who we are, who other people are. And it was really a fascinating book.
I should also say that one of the things that King points out is that women especially were drawn to Boas’ teachings because this was a time when a lot of misogyny was sort of bolstered by so-called scientific arguments, which weren’t scientific at all. And so for instance, somebody like Margaret Mead, she could actually go and talk to women. And so her book, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” was really focusing on the adolescence and sexuality of young women, which was, I think, something that was hard to do before then, when it was mostly a profession that was dominated by men.
PARUL SEHGAL: Hm. Speaking of men — just kidding.
JENNIFER SZALAI: Yeah, and it was actually interesting. I was thinking about this when I was reading your review, Dwight.
DWIGHT GARNER: I reviewed a new — it’s an anthology, and it’s quite a good one. It’s a collection of essays by 19 Arab and Middle Eastern female journalists. It’s called “Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World.” And it’s been edited by a Lebanese-British journalist named Zahra Hankir.
And it’s a fascinating book. It’s about women trying to report from some of the most repressive places on earth. And they spread the essays around really well. I mean, some of these women work for NPR, and The New York Times, and Al Jazeera, or Bloomberg. And others work for tiny websites, or just post on social media, or are freelance photographers.
And it talks about the unique dangers women face reporting for some of these countries. Because one of them says, I would be just a prize for ISIS or for some other terrorist group. I am just exactly what the enemy is to them. And one thing I liked about these essays is that they’re very real. Many of them have a foot in the Western world. Their families maybe got out, or they had educated in the States and going back to their countries. And they talk about their privilege quite a lot in this book.
And another upside of this book, even though it’s dark, it’s very funny. It’s filled with gallows humor. I mean, they tell jokes, like the woman whose husband — the kids weren’t home and tell their mother that father has been killed, electrocuted by a fence. And the mother’s reaction is thank god the power’s on. It’s that kind of really hideous joke that gets passed around these places. And this book is kind of full of that, too.
PAMELA PAUL: One of the things I’ve heard from women who’ve reported in the Middle East that was surprising at the time, but then it makes sense, is that in certain ways, it’s an advantage to be a woman in these cultures because they can talk to the women.
DWIGHT GARNER: Exactly.
PAMELA PAUL: And they would otherwise not be heard and that people will sometimes open up to them in ways that they would not and they wouldn’t have access if they were a man.
DWIGHT GARNER: No, absolutely. And one of the points one of these writers makes — I can’t remember her name right now — is that there was a time during the Iraq War when an average of 80 people were killed every day from car bombs. And she writes, these were 80 men who died every day. This is 80 widows made per day and all of these orphans made per day. And these women have to sort of take over the society, and earn living, and change things. And what’s happening on the ground in many of these countries is essentially a story about women.
And anyway, I recommend this book. I mean, one or two of the essays I would say misfire. But out of 19, that’s a small ratio. And most of them are pretty terrific.
PAMELA PAUL: All right. Let’s run down the titles again. Parul?
PARUL SEHGAL: “Semicolon” by Cecilia Watson.
JENNIFER SZALAI: “Gods of the Upper Air” by Charles King.
DWIGHT GARNER: “Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World” by Zahra Hankir, the editor.
PAMELA PAUL: All right, Dwight, Jen, Parul, thanks so much for being here.
JENNIFER SZALAI: Thanks.
PARUL SEHGAL: Thank you. DWIGHT GARNER: Thank you.
PAMELA PAUL: Remember, there’s more at nytimes.com/books. And you can always write to us at [email protected]. I write back, albeit not right away. The Book Review podcast is produced by Pedro Rosado from HeadStepper Media, with the great help of my colleague John Williams. Thanks for listening. For The New York Times, I’m Pamela Paul.
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].