Alive and Well in Pakistan reprint: Secure your copy today
My book Alive and Well in Pakistan – called “magnificent” by Ahmed Rashid, “intelligent and compelling” by Mohsin Hamid, and “wonderful” by Edwidge Danticat – was originally published in 2004. With its 10th anniversary approaching and very few unsold copies remaining, I am moving forward very actively with plans to publish and promote a new, updated edition. The new edition will be freshly redesigned and re-edited, with a new cover, and it will include an additional chapter narrating and reflecting on events in Pakistan, and my own experiences there, since 2004.
The main goal of the reprint is to bring the Pakistan that I know and love – so much more interesting and likable than the simplistic, demonized caricature of Pakistan depicted in most US media – more widely to the awareness of the American public. I’m asking those who share that goal to sponsor copies of the reprint, which I then will give away to American students, community leaders, and public officials, as I previously have done with my other book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip.
Ethan Casey with Congressman John Tierney, D-MA, in Lexington, Massachusetts, October 2012. Rep. Tierney won his re-election bid in the November 6 election.
Many thanks to Pakistani communities in Macon, Georgia; Orlando, Florida; and Portland, Oregon, who have hosted dinners to promote sponsorships, and most recently thanks to Drs. Munir and Saima Javed, Javed Ellahie, and Javed Khan for the dinner they hosted in San Jose, California on February 8. At a similar dinner in Atlanta on March 2 I’ll be delivering a speech I’m titling “Why I Love Pakistan” – attempting to answer a question I’m asked all the time.
In addition to sponsoring copies, you can pre-purchase your own person copy. Use the button below to pre-purchase the special updated, 10th-anniversary reprint edition of Alive and Well in Pakistan for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping, and one of the first copies will be sent to you as soon as it’s published, in spring 2014 or sooner. Or you can sponsor 20 copies of the reprint for $300, and I’ll set aside your personal copy as a thank-you gift. Sponsor 10 copies for $150, and I’ll send you a copy of the original edition immediately.
Sponsor 20 copies of the updated 10th-anniversary edition of Alive and Well in Pakistan for $300 and receive your own personal copy as a thank-you gift, or sponsor 10 copies and receive a copy of the original edition as a thank-you gift, by using the button on this page.
As I say wherever I speak, we’re teammates. Thank you for your partnership and support!
Ethan Casey
Seattle
February 19, 2013
Home Free stories: Dr. John Bryant Wyman
SEATTLE – Since returning here two months ago today from my 3 1/2-month, 18,000+-mile road trip around the USA, I’ve been transcribing my notebooks and starting to write my book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip. Today I’m posting the first of what I promise will be a series of sketches of some of the interesting Americans I met. Think of it as the blog that I just plain didn’t have the energy to write during the trip itself, with all the driving and interviewing I was doing. I’ll post as often as I can, while I continue writing through the spring and early summer.
Dr. John Bryant Wyman in front of the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, September 2012.
You can reserve one of the first copies, and support the book’s publication, by pre-purchasing Home Free by credit card or PayPal for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping, using this button:
One of the first and most auspicious characters I met was Dr. John Bryant “Bry” Wyman, a physician – 79 years old but not retired – in Madison, Wisconsin. Bry is the father of my friend Jeb Wyman, who teaches at Seattle Central Community College. Jeb introduced me to his father and to several longtime friends in Marshfield, the town in central Wisconsin where he grew up. I was especially keen to meet Bry because, two years ago this month, Jeb arrived for a visit and, instead of driving to Marshfield as planned, prevailed on his father to join the historic occupation of the state capitol building in Madison, in sub-freezing weather, that began as a protest against Republican governor Scott Walker’s attempt to rescind collective bargaining rights for unionized state employees.
“I’ve been in the privileged class since birth,” Bry told me. “Somehow I got the idea of medicine in high school and just kept going. And I’ve always been on a salary. And all this came to my awareness, that many people don’t have this. So I’m grateful that Jeb grabbed me. He didn’t have to drag me. He just said, ‘Dad, we’re not going to Marshfield. We’re going to the Capitol.’ I think I said, ‘You oughta have a recorder, Jeb.’”
The occupation, he said, “was not joyful, but it certainly was happy. They would move in portable stands. When Jeb was here it was very pleasant: sunny, bright, not snowy. But then there were days when it was snowing, and man, I was buttoned up.”
“Were there counter-protests?” my wife, Jenny, asked him. Jenny traveled with me the first two weeks, from Seattle as far as Milwaukee.
“The Koch brothers brought in Sarah Palin,” he told her.
I asked why he had decided to join the occupation.
“Because my patients were not being cared for,” he said. “Couples would say, ‘This month is his turn to get medicine, and next month is mine.’ And that really disturbed me.” He showed us the sign that he had carried during the occupation. On one side it read :
SOME OF MY PATIENTS
CAN’T AFFORD THEIR PRESCRIPTIONS
and on the other side:
GOVERNMENTS EXIST
TO SERVE THEIR CITIZENS
“I didn’t go to any of the group meetings,” Bry continued. “I wasn’t involved in the decision-making or anything. My decision was, ‘What time am I going to go up to the Capitol?’ I would walk around once, and then I would stand or sit. And then people would signal me with the thumbs-up or whatever. Usually I wouldn’t go around more than once or twice, because of this knee. I get six or eight emails a day, still. I really can’t say I was much involved, other than walking around with a sign. I was just there as a body. And identifying myself as a physician, and thinking I would have more influence as a physician than as a union member. So that’s why I wore a tie. I thought that if a physician announced that he was unhappy, that it might influence more people who were not physicians.
“I’m disappointed,” he confessed. “I grew up with a liberal father. Even though Mother didn’t express herself, Dad did. And Dad said, ‘Wisconsin politics are clean. It’s nothing like Illinois.’ And you know, workmen’s compensation was developed in Wisconsin. So that’s how I grew up. I’m disappointed in what’s happening to Wisconsin now, with its long history that I was educated in by my dad.”
You can reserve one of the first copies, and support the book’s publication, by pre-purchasing Home Free by credit card or PayPal for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping, using this button:
Review: Lustrum (Conspirata), by Robert Harris
Once upon a time, novelists could be simultaneously serious and popular. Hemingway comes to mind, but even moreso Steinbeck, who had less literary pretension and more sustained and pointed topical engagement. Graham Greene aimed at once for contemporary relevance and durability, and more often than not hit the bulls-eye with later novels such as The Quiet American, The Comedians, and The Human Factor. Lesser, or at least less remembered, writers such as Morris West and Nevil Shute took seriously both the craft of storytelling and the novelist’s responsibility to have something of public significance to say.
The British writer Robert Harris is a throwback to this tradition: a novelist who embraces a public role – more for his books than for himself as a celebrity or personality – and who aspires both to entertain and to edify. None other than Nelson Mandela has called him “a writer who handles suspense like a literary Alfred Hitchcock.” He works with aplomb in several genres, from the fascinating counterfactual Nazi thriller Fatherland, to a fun and gripping imagining of Roman life and bureaucracy in Pompeii, to a brilliant, queasily political contemporary murder mystery involving a lightly fictionalized Tony Blair in The Ghost. Across an impressively wide range of subjects, Harris brings to bear a distinctively British blend of political shrewdness and lightly carried but impressive and genuine erudition. He’s one of those Englishmen who really did study Latin at one of those fancy high schools, but who is well bred enough not to leave his less couth reader feeling inferior for not having done so.
Lustrum (2010), retitled Conspirata for its US edition, makes good use of its author’s presumptive classical education. A sequel to Harris’s wonderful previous novel Imperium, it purports to be a portion of a recently unearthed candid memoir written by Tiro, slave and private secretary to the great Roman statesman and orator Cicero. The device provides a delicious fly-on-the-wall vantage for Harris to imagine, and us to witness, what really went on in the late days of the Roman Republic. It’s like watching a political multi-chariot pile-up.
Part of the fun of historical fiction generally, and a big part of the point of this novel in particular, is that we know all too well how things turned out in real life. There’s a lot of truth in the truism that historical fiction is really about the present day. “There are no lasting victories in politics, there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events,” reflects Tiro (and through him Harris, of course) at one point. “If my work has a moral, this is it.” Forty pages later, in case the reader hasn’t gotten the message yet, there’s this:
Cicero sighed and said, more to himself than to any of us, “I wonder what men will make of us a thousand years from now. Perhaps Caesar is right – this whole republic needs to be pulled down and built again. I tell you, I have grown to dislike these patricians as much as I dislike the mob – and they haven’t the excuse of poverty or ignorance.” And then again, a few moments later: “We have so much – our arts and learning, laws, treasure, slaves, the beauty of Italy, dominion over the entire earth – and yet why is it that some ineradicable impulse of the human mind always impels us to foul our own nest?” I surreptitiously made a note of both remarks.
Such didactic points are well taken, but Harris is too good a storyteller to lay them on thick. Lustrum is the best sort of historical fiction, replete with drawing-room skulduggery and tawdry goings-on demonstrating how little human beings have changed over the past two thousand-plus years. While I eagerly await the third installment in the promised trilogy I’ll busy myself enjoying Harris’s latest novel The Fear Index, a thriller set in the thick of the recent world financial crisis.
ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Join his email list here.
Home Free and Bearing the Bruise in 2013: A New Year’s Message
The title of this post refers to the titles of two of my books, of course, but the phrases also have connotations that point beyond the books themselves. Which is to say that I hope that readers find my books to be about more than what they’re ostensibly about.
Ethan Casey with the courageous Haitian human rights lawyer Mario Joseph at A Great Good Place for Books bookstore, Oakland, California, December 14, 2012. Ethan writes about Mario Joseph and his client Father Gerard Jean-Juste in Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti.
Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, for example, is “about” Haiti, but the title comes from a Haitian proverb that translates as “He who gives the blow forgets; he who bears the bruise remembers” – and that is about a whole lot more than Haiti. For starters, it has a political dimension as well as a personal one for me, as someone who has been both bruised and graced by thirty years’ experience of Haiti.
Home Free, the title of the book I’m currently writing for publication this fall about the 19,000-mile driving trip I undertook around the United States this past fall, has at least a double connotation and (I hope) raises questions beyond the phrase’s conventional meaning. Is my home country a free one? Are you and I free, here at home? If so, what does that mean?
I recently added a word to the subtitle, changing “An American Road Trip” to “A Real American Road Trip”. I was toying with changing the actual title to The Real America in backhanded homage to Sarah Palin, but I decided it would be presumptuous to give the impression that I thought I was discovering or depicting, well, the real America, rather than only the very interesting and telling, but limited, slices that I did find. In any case, the word “real” is now in the subtitle, and it’s there as a sort of homage to John Steinbeck as well as to Pittsburgh journalist Bill Steigerwald, and to find out what I mean by that you’ll have to read the book.
Speaking of reading the book, please pre-purchase it now and ensure that your copy will be among the first ones that are mailed out in September, hot off the presses, as soon as Home Free is published. Your pre-purchase of Home Free supports the business side of the work I do as an independent writer. Consider buying multiple copies as presents for friends and relatives. Yes, I do have plans to make it available in one or more e-book formats, but those aren’t ready yet, and in any case what it really is is a printed book. And, as 2013 gets underway and to mark the third anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, I’m making a special offer: pre-purchase Home Free and, for only $14.95 more, I’ll send you Bearing the Bruise now. That’s a $5 discount on Bearing the Bruise, as a way of thanking you for your support and interest. You can use these buttons to make your purchase by credit or debit card or PayPal:
Pre-purchase Home Free: A Real American Road Trip for $19.95 plus shipping, and get Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti at the discounted price of $14.95:
Pre-purchase Home Free: A Real American Road Trip for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping:
Ethan enjoying his vacation in the Olympic National Forest, Washington State, January 2, 2013. Happy New Year!
You also can mail a check to the address on the Contact page of this website.
Finally for now, I’m delighted to remind you of my plans to publish a special 10th-anniversary reprint edition of my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, including new material. I expect that to be available this fall too, and you’ll be hearing more about it as the time nears. You can support my project of distributing Alive and Well in Pakistan widely throughout mainstream America by sponsoring copies of the reprinted edition.
Thanks again for your support, and Happy New Year!
Full Circle to Seattle: A Fascinating American Road Trip
Well, I finally made it home. After three and a half months driving through every region of the contiguous United States, meeting and interviewing a fascinating range of Americans, I arrived home in Seattle on December 18. Do I ever have a story to tell!
Ethan Casey returning his rental car at SeaTac Airport, December 19, 2012.
I can’t begin to tell the full story here, or even in the book that I’ll be sitting down to start writing in January, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip. Well, I can at least begin telling it, and I’ll do so in snippets and photos that I’ll be posting on my website and on Facebook as often as possible over the winter and spring, as I write the book and prepare it for fall 2013 publication. Even the complete book, of course, will be only a selection – I hope a judicious and artful selection – of all that I experienced and witnessed over more than 19,000 driving miles between early September and mid-December. For now, suffice it to say that it was the adventure of a lifetime, and that I’ll do all I can to cram as much of it as I can into an entertaining and edifying book of readable length.
Pre-purchase Home Free: A Real American Road Trip for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping:
My original plan was to blog while traveling, but it quickly became apparent to me that that just wasn’t going to happen. Just getting from place to place around this enormous country took a great deal of time and energy, and most days I also had interviews, social obligations, and/or speaking engagements. This trip confirmed a bias I had already developed during previous trips, especially to Pakistan and Haiti, against trying to write and travel at the same time. Writing urgently timely journalism is one thing, and I’ve been there, done that. But the books of narrative nonfiction that I write aspire to a more durable relevance and, with choices to make about where to invest my limited time and energy, I’m forced to prioritize the tasks that can’t be put off: the work of traveling itself (which in America, in the absence of any real public transportation, means driving), interviewing, and forward planning.
Speaking of forward planning, I could not have pulled off this trip without the kind of support and advocacy that my assistant, Brian Seredynski, provided over the summer and throughout the trip. Brian is now leaving me for a full-time opportunity locally near his home city of Chicago, and I wish him the very best. Brian’s replacement, Rashida Khan, will begin working with me in January.
Living out of a rental car became a way of life after a while, and it felt strange last Tuesday as I struggled along Interstate 5 in rush-hour traffic through Tacoma, caught site of my beloved Space Needle and the Seattle skyline, then finally pulled up in front of my own house and called out to my wife, “Hi, Honey, I’m home!” There’s no place I’d rather be right now, and all those miles of highway, all those landscapes, all those people I met suddenly seem like a long, strange dream. But it was a real American road trip, it’s documented in audio recordings and half a dozen full notebooks, and I’m eager to relive and share it in my book.
Ethan Casey at the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, California, December 13, 2012.
Over the last couple of weeks, as I drove, I indulged myself in a purely hypothetical thought experiment: What if, when I got to Seattle, I just kept going and drove around America again? I would never – could never – do that, of course. But a do-over would – hypothetically – give me a chance to visit a completely different set of destinations, and at a different moment, which would of course make it a completely different trip.
What’s gratifying about the trip I actually did make is that, as it became what it became, it ended up becoming pretty much the trip I had planned and hoped for, and more. This sufficiency is exemplified, though by no means fully expressed, by the fact that the three specific interviews on which I had my heart set all worked out: with Professor Timothy Snyder at Yale University, with the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat in Miami, and with Sherron Watkins, the former Enron vice president who blew the whistle on that corporation’s notorious 2001 scandal, in Houston. And much, much more, as the saying goes. Watch this space!
Beginning in February or possibly sooner, I’ll be carving out time while writing to offer a slide show from the trip at churches, Rotary Clubs, and other venues around Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, and eventually elsewhere. (If you’d like to invite me to speak to your group, please contact Rashida Khan at admin@ethancaseymedia.com.) I’ll also, as I said, be posting stories, quotes, and photos here on my website and on Facebook. Whether you see the slide show in person or enjoy the snippets here, I invite you to support my independent writing and publishing work by pre-purchasing Home Free: A Real American Road Trip. You can purchase it right now online with your credit or debit card, and your copy will be shipped to you as soon as the book is published in the fall of 2013.
Pre-purchase Home Free: A Real American Road Trip for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping:
You can purchase multiple copies – it’s not too soon to plan ahead for next Christmas! You can also sponsor or pre-purchase copies of the 10th-anniversary reprint of Alive and Well in Pakistan, or purchase my other books Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip using the buttons in the right margin.
Seattle
December 21, 2012
Newtown is a Village in Pakistan
Redmond, Oregon, December 18 - On the Monday morning after the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, James Howard Kunstler wrote:
Next, of course, comes the empty ritual of pretending that we must make sure something like this never happens again. How? By some forensic inquiry into the psychology of the shooter, Mr. Lanza… his comings, goings, email musings, Netflix rentals, chemical composition of his fingernail clippings?
I suspect that we indulge in such tiresome parsings of each killer’s particulars because we want to avoid facing their much more widely damning societal, which is to say political, context. Five long months ago, just after James Holmes killed twelve people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, I wrote an article with the provocative title “The Colorado Killer Is Not a Muslim”. On the Huffington Post version of my article, reader Robert Arredondo objected:
This is not a point to be made. Those with political agendas who commit acts to perpetuate their social, religious, political goals by organize[d] means are considered terrorist. A lone gunman overcome by madness or anger is not.
Arredondo’s point is, strictly speaking, true enough. But we indulge ourselves and each other when we insist that incidents like Aurora and Newtown are not political. If such an incident doesn’t have a political context – a context, that is, that challenges us as a society to articulate and enforce our collective priorities – then what does?
For starters, we need to face the fact that we’re all too eager to parse a perpetrator’s psychology when he’s a white guy, but when he’s brown and/or Muslim that’s all we allow him to be. But Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist and, because Gabrielle Giffords was an elected official, Jared Loughner’s attempted killing of her had the effect, if perhaps not the intention, of terrorism. Furthermore, if Loughner, Holmes, Dylan Klebold thirteen years ago at Columbine High School, now Lanza, and others whose names escape our memory were troubled young men, so was the Pakistan-born U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up Times Square in May 2010.
What do troubled young white Americans here at home have to do with troubled young Muslims, whether here or overseas? Adam Lankford offers one thoughtful answer in a December 18 New York Times op-ed titled “What Drives Suicidal Mass Killers”:
It is tempting to look back at recent history and wonder what’s wrong with America — our culture and our policies. But underneath the pain, the rage and the desire to die, rampage shooters like Mr. Lanza are remarkably similar to aberrant mass killers — including suicide terrorists — in other countries. The difference rests in how they are shaped by cultural forces and which destructive behaviors they seek to copy.
Another insight comes from the authoritative Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in his recent book Pakistan on the Brink:
One-third of Pakistanis today lack drinking water, another 77 million have unreliable food sources, and half the school-age children do not go to school. The literacy rate is 57 percent, the lowest in South Asia and not much better than the 52 percent that prevailed at the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Half the population are not even looking for jobs, since they know they won’t be able to find them. The country needs at least a 9 percent annual growth rate to employ its under-twenties, who make up 60 percent of the population. The 37 percent of Pakistanis who are under the age of fifteen give Pakistan one of the world’s largest youth bulges.
“The Newtown Massacre to me is largely about the failure of men in America,” writes Kunstler,
and in particular the failure of men to raise up male children into men. … What matters now is that an epochal undertow of events is dragging this enormous nation into an economic convulsion that will inevitably turn political. I don’t think that our society can be redeemed in its current form. It has to pass through a tribulation that demands the reemergence of adult male humans who know how to be men in more than one dimension.
Children in Pakistan have in common with children in America that both are God’s children. In both countries, the urgent challenge is to provide young men with productive work to do and dignified, adult roles to play in their families and society. I specify young men in particular because it’s usually young men, not women, who shoot people and blow things up. Thus Newtown is a lot like many villages in Pakistan. What the children and adult citizens of Newtown suffered on December 14 is what children and adults fear, and all too often suffer, every week in Pakistan at the hands of the Taliban and other extremists on one hand, and of the American operators of unmanned drone aircraft on the other.
So if, as I argue, mass killings in America are unavoidably political, what of it? The “meaningful” gun control legislation President Obama is urging, and on which public opinion seems to be insisting, would be a good start and would signal our seriousness. And there’s no need to be timid or apologetic. Since, as Newtown all too brutally illustrated, none of us has any real physical security anyway, there’s no reason not to push back hard against the gun culture and the gun lobby. Better late than never. The alternative is to allow our society to be ruled by bullies.
ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published next year and is available for pre-purchase. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Join his email list here.
Who is responsible for David Oliver Relin’s death?
Farmington, New Mexico, December 4 - In October 2008, I had the honor of introducing David Oliver Relin at an event hosted by the King County Library System in the Seattle suburb of Renton. How long ago that seems. The prestige of Greg Mortenson and the phenomenal popularity of the book Three Cups of Tea were nearing their peak. I was pleased to have been asked to introduce Relin to an audience in my home city, and interested to meet the man.
I told the audience something I still believe: that, by writing Three Cups of Tea, Relin had done a good deed for which we owe him a debt of gratitude. The library people also asked me to do a short audio interview with Relin, which they posted on their website (unfortunately, I can’t find it by searching there). I found him likable, cosmopolitan and intrepid, an “Asia hand” after my own heart; he had spent time in Nepal and Vietnam, both countries I also know, and was eager to talk about his wide range of interests and next projects. I felt it was to his credit that he didn’t want to be known only as the co-author of Three Cups of Tea.
I felt envious of him too, of course. He was only two years older than I and no better a writer, yet he had happened onto a book project that not only was both meaty and useful, but surely made him a whole lot of money. Many writers spend a lifetime craving but never finding such a sweet spot. Three Cups of Tea should have made Relin’s career, and therein lies his tragedy. News reports of his suicide mention that he had been unhappy about having to share credit for the book’s authorship with Mortenson. As he told Etude, the University of Oregon’s literary journal, in 2008: “That’s been the only negative thing about this whole adventure for me. It was published that way over my objections.”
In retrospect, I hear in those words less bitterness than gracious dignity and restraint. In my interview with him, I took a wild guess and asked Relin if he had been influenced by an earlier similar bestseller, Tracy Kidder’s account of Dr. Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti, Mountains Beyond Mountains. He readily acknowledged that, yes, he had used it very directly as a model. As someone interested in both Haiti and Pakistan and admiring of both Farmer and Mortenson, I found the connection intriguing, and for a writer there’s no shame in being influenced by another writer. There is shame, though, in being forced to run away from your own work. I think Relin appreciated my having asked such a writerly question; implicit in it was respect for him as an author – respect he wasn’t getting elsewhere.
I don’t know what else might have been going on in Relin’s head or in his personal life. But if I had been bullied, as he apparently was by Penguin Books, into sharing authorship credit on a book that I and I alone actually wrote, no amount of money could have made up for the indignity. Mountains Beyond Mountains is a better book than Three Cups of Tea, and one reason is that Mountains Beyond Mountains is indisputably Tracy Kidder’s book, not Paul Farmer’s. Three Cups of Tea always felt to me, even before the scandal, like what it apparently is: a project cobbled together by way of an introduction in a Manhattan office tower. Kidder, by contrast, enjoyed a substantial prior reputation and conceived and decided on his own to write his own book. Kidder thus was, and remains, able and willing to do what authors are supposed to do: shoulder an author’s authority and the responsibility that goes with it.
In April 2011, immediately after 60 Minutes and Jon Krakauer broke the Three Cups of Tea scandal, I wrote an article defending Greg, in which I specifically asked Relin to step forward. Perhaps a little pompously, I wrote:
It’s not okay to give [John] Steinbeck a pass [for partially fictionalizing Travels with Charley, as proven by journalist Bill Steigerwald] but attack Greg Mortenson for what likely are much lesser literary evasions, inaccuracies, or whatever you want to call them. And on this point I would like to hear from David Oliver Relin, the writer who shares authorship credit and royalties 50/50 with Greg. Relin has rarely been acknowledged as he should be for having actually writtenThree Cups of Tea. Now would be a good time for him to step forward and shoulder the responsibility that goes along with authorship.
At the time and since, I’ve been baffled by Relin’s silence. Now, I think I understand better. How it must have irked him to be strong-armed by his own publisher and stiff-armed by Mortenson’s camp, only to find himself yoked anew with Mortenson at the wrong end of a frivolous lawsuit and forced to pay his own legal bills. So much for all the money he made from the book, for starters. All of us – Jon Krakauer and the producers of 60 Minutes, Greg Mortenson himself (who also has remained frustratingly quiet), the board and staff of the Central Asia Institute, and we millions who allowed ourselves to bask in Greg’s good works thanks to Relin’s good book – need to face the fact that the scandal’s costs now include the human life of a good writer who was never allowed to claim full responsibility for his own work. Who should be held responsible for his death?
ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published next year and is available for pre-purchase. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Join his email list here.
Admin and marketing assistant needed
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I’m an author of books of personal reporting on Pakistan (“Magnificent” – Ahmed Rashid) and Haiti (“A heartfelt account” – Paul Farmer), currently researching and writing a similar book based on a long road trip around the USA during the fall of 2012. I need a part-time marketing assistant/coordinator who can help lead and assist in marketing duties to replace Brian Seredynski, who has been excellent helping plan and manage my current road trip around the USA and is now accepting a full-time opportunity elsewhere. The person I’m looking for must have a flexible schedule and strong phone and writing skills and be organized and computer savvy. You can live anywhere in the United States and work from home, but you must be available to me weekdays by phone and email.
I live in Seattle but travel throughout the United States and occasionally overseas, and I need administrative and marketing support to build on what Brian and I have accomplished this year, to plan and schedule my 2013 speaking schedule, and to cultivate and correspond with existing and new contacts on my behalf. Compensation is negotiable based on experience and other factors. Ideal start date January 1, 2013.
Here are some of the skills that my assistant will need to have:
- Flexible schedule
- Availability during and after business hours
- WordPress
- Minor HTML
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Acrobat
- Writing skills
- Microsoft Word
- Data entry / management
- Microsoft Excel
- Google Documents
- Schedule management
- Contact management
- Organizational skills
- Marketing
- Cold Calls
- Warm Calls
- Sales
- Strong Phone Skills
- Acting liaison
- Logistics
- Constant Contact
- E-mail blasts
- Social Media
- Account Receivables
- Shipping via USPS
To express interest or recommend someone, please contact me by email at ethan@ethancasey.com.
Colorado Springs
November 28, 2012
Reprinting Alive and Well in Pakistan: An Open Letter
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Dear friends and supporters of my work:
Existing printings of my book Alive and Well in Pakistan are almost sold out, and there is an urgent need to reprint it. Since its original publication, the book’s publisher has gone out of business and the book publishing and retailing industries have changed significantly. Today, an author like myself has both a compulsion and an opportunity to write, publish, market, and promote himself independently.
Ethan Casey with Congressman John Tierney, D-MA, in Lexington, Massachusetts, October 2012. Rep. Tierney won his re-election bid in the November 6 election.
2014 will mark ten years since Alive and Well in Pakistan‘s first publication, and my plan is to reprint a “special 10th-anniversary edition” in the fall of 2013 including updated material. In order to cover publishing costs and, even more important, to maximize the impact of the new edition on the awareness of mainstream America, I’m asking friends of my work to sponsor the reprint at $15 per copy. You can sponsor as many copies as you want; the more copies that get sponsored, the more I can give away to encourage other Americans to join me in my what The Daily Telegraph called my real journey, a search for common humanity. If you sponsor 10 or more copies of the reprint, I’ll send you one of the few remaining copies of the current edition as a gift. Anyone who sponsors 100 or more copies, and who wishes to be, will be acknowledged in the printed book itself.
Since Alive and Well in Pakistan was first published in 2004, it has been well received by both American and Pakistani readers, as well as by reviewers and fellow authors. It has been called “magnificent” (Ahmed Rashid), “intelligent and compelling” (Mohsin Hamid), “compulsory reading for anyone visiting Pakistan” (Munis D. Faruqui in the Harvard International Review), and “wonderful … a model of travel writing” (Edwidge Danticat). But the quote that says the most about what I hope it has achieved is from the review in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph: “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity.”
In 2010 I published a follow-up book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. Over the past several years, I have used both books to introduce myself and what I call the Pakistan that I know – a much more interesting and likable country than the Pakistan that we see on television – to college and high school students as well as adults audiences at churches, civic clubs, and other groups around mainstream America. I’ve been helped in this effort by supporters who have sponsored copies for me to give away to American students, educators, libraries, and public officials. The impact of the sponsorship program are shown by appreciative messages and write-ups such as these:
Dear Mr. Casey, Thank you very much for the copy of your book. I am thoroughly looking forward to learning more about life and the hardships of those in Pakistan and how terrorism shapes our (Americans’) perception of Muslims. Thank you for taking the time to speak to our class. I sincerely appreciate the importance of issues such as this, especially during times when it seems that our lives are permeated by a constant fear of terrorism via the news. - Texas Christian University student Paul Jorden
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Following Casey’s presentation, all students were given a copy of Casey’s most recent publication,Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. Students were encouraged to read the book and give constructive feedback/reflections of their experiences with the text. Casey … handed out the books, and explained that the cost of the books had been donated by individuals and families that share Casey’s “concern for bringing a more accurate and human view of Pakistan to American students and other readers.” - Seattle Central Community College student A.K. Jordan
In addition to sponsoring copies, you also can support the reprint by pre-purchasing your own personal copy of the updated 10th anniversary edition of Alive and Well in Pakistan for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping, and by inviting me to speak to your group anywhere in North America during 2013. To arrange for me to visit your city, contact Brian Seredynski by email or by phone at 847-636-9894.
Sponsor the 10th anniversary edition of Alive and Well in Pakistan for $15.00 per copy. Ethan gives sponsored copies away to students, educators, libraries, and public officials. Please specify the number of copies you wish to sponsor:
Pre-purchase your own copy of the 10th anniversary updated edition of Alive and Well in Pakistan for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping:
You also can purchase or sponsor books by sending a check to:
Ethan Casey Media LLC
P.O. Box 85315
Seattle, WA 98145-1315
Thank you for your support!
Austin, Texas
November 24, 2012
Gaza and the Need for Muslim Activism in America
Galveston, Texas - I’d rather be telling you about my driving trip around America and promoting my next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, but I feel compelled to say something about the appalling, and tiresomely predictable, subject of Gaza. Or rather, not Gaza per se but the baleful effect that the decades-long festering sore that is Israel-Palestine has on public life here in the United States.
American Muslims demonstrating against the Taliban attack on Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai in Orlando, Florida, November 12, 2012.
I’ve written about this before, never eagerly but willingly, because, as a non-Jewish, non-Muslim American, I don’t appreciate the way my country’s politics is distorted, and its public discussion muffled and wrapped in euphemism, whenever the matter at hand is Israel’s behavior in the Palestinian territories. My previous expressed views are on record in a June 2010 article with the candid title “Israel and the Distortion of American Politics”. After publishing a more recent article I lost a friend (I thought he was a friend) for making the obvious point that, far from being victims, Jewish Americans are an affluent, privileged, and influential community.
Whether those are good or bad things for a community to be depends on the uses such a community makes of its affluence, privilege, and influence. But part of the problem is that too many non-Jews in America say nothing rather than risk being branded, as I essentially was by my ex-friend, tantamount to a Holocaust denier.
All this is prelude to my real point: that both the situation in the Middle East and the quality of American public life will improve when American Muslims become more audible and visible. I do know, because they’re friends of mine, that many of them are trying hard to be heard. At a dinner party attended by privileged white people recently in South Carolina, I was made to answer the myopic or tendentious question, “Why don’t Muslims object when Muslims commit terrorist attack and atrocities?” The answer I gave was that they do; we just don’t hear them. Less than two weeks later I was asked to speak at a public demonstration organized by Muslims in Orlando, Florida against the Taliban attack on Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old girl who had become an outspoken advocate for girls’ education in Pakistan. In my remarks I got applause for saying that, if Malala can do what she has done, at real risk to her personal safety, such a rally is the least that we in America can do.
The point is not that we should be pleased with ourselves for holding a rally, but that that really is the very least that we can do. We need to do much more. Applause is gratifying, but it’s the merest baby step toward the much more assertive activism that I believe is urgently called for. The Muslims who attended the Orlando rally, and others like them all around America, are affluent and privileged. What they’re not is publicly influential, for two reasons. One is that, understandably though unfairly, they’ve been stigmatized and forced onto the defensive ever since 2001. But the other side of the same coin is that they’ve acquiesced in their own marginalization. In America, communities get attention and respect when they step forward and make noise, nonviolently to be sure but by all means assertively and politically. If you don’t toot your own horn, you can’t expect anyone else to toot it for you.
I’ve written before that the civil rights movement offers a model. Another model is the remarkable success that gay Americans have enjoyed in advancing their concerns and aspirations in recent years. The point is that such success doesn’t just happen. Gay people have a dedicated day every July when they descend on Disney World en masse, all wearing red t-shirts. The statement they’re making is: We’re here among you, we have money and influence, and we respectfully require you to deal with it.
There’s a lot of confusion and overlap, but the issues are essentially not religious but political. To my Muslim friends, I respectfully suggest that life will improve for Muslims in Palestine and Pakistan, and for all of us in America, the day that thousands of American Muslim families show up at Disney World all wearing green t-shirts.
ETHAN CASEY‘s next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published next year and is available for pre-purchase. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Join his email list here.
