BOOKS
Through Ethan Casey Media LLC and this website I publish, market, and promote three of my own books and a planned reprint of The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China, a historically significant 1975 book by my late friend and mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit. I sell individual copies of all my books and also invite you to sponsor copies that I give away to students, libraries, and political, religious, and civic leaders around North America. You can learn more about the book sponsorship program here.
My book Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time was published in 2004 by a London publisher that has since become inactive. I hope that eventually it will be reprinted in a new UK and/or US edition. Until then, you can purchase it from me online or at my speaking engagements. Used copies are also available through various channels online, but if you want to support my livelihood and ongoing work, I ask you to consider buying it through Ethan Casey Media LLC. It tells the story of the first decade of my involvement with Pakistan during an important transitional period in recent history (1994-2004). I’m very proud of it and believe it is of enduring interest as an eyewitness account and literary document. You can read what Ahmed Rashid, Mohsin Hamid, Edwidge Danticat, The Daily Telegraph, and others have said about Alive and Well in Pakistan here.
In early 2009 I returned to Pakistan for the first time in five years because speaking audiences around North America had been asking me to comment on current events in Pakistan, and I felt it was important for me to gain a more up-to-date perspective. The period 2004-09 was an extremely eventful one in Pakistan (even moreso than usual), and I planned my 2009 trip with the goal of seeing old friends and contacts, and meeting new ones, to hear and document personal and topical stories from that period, and to catch history on the fly again, showing up and witnessing whatever happened to happen during the trip itself.
The result was Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). The book is a sequel to Alive and Well in Pakistan, but it’s not necessary to have read the first book first. Photographer Pete Sabo and I began our six-week trip in Mumbai, ended it in Karachi, and traveled entirely overland in between, via the Attari-Wagah border crossing, Lahore, Islamabad, and towns along the legendary Grand Trunk Road. We included India on the itinerary because we were traveling just three months after the November 2009 terrorist attack on Mumbai, I had not visited India since 1995, and I felt it was important to hear Indians’ perspectives on Pakistan and Pakistanis as well as to convey a sense of the situation of Muslims living in India. Overtaken By Events includes 32 pages of photographs from our trip by Pete Sabo. More of Pete’s photos can be seen online here and are available for sale as prints.
In February-March 2011 Pete and I made another three-week trip to Pakistan, focusing on the troubled Swat valley and other areas affected by the severe flooding of the summer of 2010. I am writing a new chapter, to be added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events and possibly made available separately as an e-book, tentatively titled “After the Flood” and based on that trip and other recent developments. Anyone sponsoring 10 or more copies of Overtaken By Events will receive a personal copy of either the original edition (immediately) or the reprint including the new chapter (when it’s available).
Tent city, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, September 2010. Photo by Pete Sabo.
In 2010 I made two trips to Haiti, a country I visited first as a teenager in 1982 and many times since. The horrific earthquake of January 12, 2010 made me feel both motivated and obligated to complete and publish a book on my experiences in Haiti, and the understanding of that country and of the world as a whole that I feel I’ve gained from it, that I’ve been trying to write since 1994. That book, Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti, will be published in 2012.
The third and final section of Bearing the Bruise, which I’m currently finishing, recounts my travels and conversations in Haiti since the earthquake, including a planned third trip in September 2011. Bearing the Bruise is a personal nonfiction narrative account – a travel book – like my two books on Pakistan, but in some ways it’s much more far-reaching and ambitious. There’s a lot to be said about Haiti, and about the United States and the world as seen from Haiti, and it’s not easily summarized. As Tracy Kidder, the author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, said to me in 2004 – a significant year for Haiti, during which I made several trips there – “I’ve learned so much about the world from Haiti – some of which I almost wish I hadn’t learned.”
Along the way I’ve discovered surprising parallels and connections between Haiti and Pakistan, two countries that on the face of it seem to have little to do with each other. These include the inspiring fact that Pakistani-American friends of mine unhesitatingly volunteered their time, money, professional skills, and other resources to help save lives in Haiti in the wake of the earthquake. I began exploring these connections in an article I wrote while in Haiti in September 2010 and articulated them in greater depth in a TEDx talk at the Princeton Public Library in June 2011. These connections, and some of my Pakistani friends’ stories from Haiti, will be included in Bearing the Bruise.
I need to continue pre-selling individual and sponsored copies of Bearing the Bruise in order to cover printing and other publishing costs, and I invite you to support the book by pre-purchasing it online today.
Bearing the Bruise will include photographs by Pete Sabo, who traveled to Haiti with a Pakistani-led medical team March 2010 and with me in August-September 2010. Pete’s Haiti photos are also available for sale as prints. I’m again commissioning the Seattle-based designer Jason Kopec, who designed the beautiful cover of Overtaken By Events, to design the cover of Bearing the Bruise.
I plan soon to begin promoting and pre-selling copies of the reprint of Clyde Edwin Pettit’s masterpiece The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China. In the meantime I invite you to read my summary of that book on this website, and I welcome hearing from anyone interested in pre-purchasing The Experts or using it in the classroom, and from anyone who knew Ed. You can reach me directly through the contact page of this website.
I also invite you to join my Facebook page, where I post updates on my projects and links to my articles and other relevant items.
- Ethan Casey, June 27, 2011
