Arts and Culture

Richard Holbrooke Reads Pictures Without Borders: Bosnia Revisited

Exactly 10 years after the Dayton peace agreement ended the war in Bosnia, Steve Horn has produced a photography book that tells the story better than words can. He shows the painful, hateful, irrational descent into hell of people who, whatever their alleged differences, had lived together in relative peace. Equally important, he chronicles their slow recovery. We have a long way to go before Bosnia is a “normal” country. But American leadership and international assistance, primarily from the European Union, has ended this war. It will not resume. This book is an indispensable Steve Horn

chronicle of how it happened, and, despite the horror, should encourage people to engage internationally when great injustice is being done.

A book like this could also be written now about that other hellhole of the 1990s, Rwanda. I hope someday such a book will also be possible for Darfur, Chechnya, Afghanistan and other places where international assistance, led by the United States, can make a real difference.

Richard Holbrooke was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001 and chief negotiator of the Dayton Peace Accords.

Chanel Govreau Listens to Sage Francis

At a time when much of hip-hop profits off of homophobic nursery rhymes, drug infatuation and the glorification of domestic violence, artist Sage Francis is a breath of fresh opinion. Yet his music is more than just mindful hip-hop. With intellectual poetry and beats as intriguing and eclectic as his vocabulary, Sage spits what we’ve all

been yearning to say but are too tonguetied and baffled to verbalize. The 2001 Makeshift Patriot is essential listening—Sage at his most politically driven. Written only a month after 9/11, the song vividly describes racial profiling and looming threats to our civil liberties.

A Healthy Distrust, released in February, is an aural feast for human rights activists, with references to the diamond trade, the death penalty and the war in Iraq.

As you listen, don’t resist the urge to fall apart.

Margot Adler Reads Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced

Most American journalists never face the fear and danger that was Irma Flaquer’s daily experience. This courageous journalist and activist wrote powerful stories and columns during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s, when government-sponsored death squads roamed Guatemala— freely able to torture, murder and “disappear” any reformer, activist, government critic, journalist or defender of the poor. June Erlick’s gripping book brings Irma Flaquer to life—her powerful and often emotional columns, her sense of style and her often unconventional actions.

Near the end of her life, before she was presumably abducted and killed, repression in Guatemala was so severe that Flaquer could not even leave her house. And yet she continued to act and write. It is a lesson many journalists could heed today. June Erlick has not only produced an incredible investigative work, she has written a very special book for anyone who believes we must act from a deep place of courage.

Margot Adler is the host of National Public Radio’s Justice Talking and a correspondent for NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. Her most recent book is Heretic’s Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution.