Posts filed under 'Human Rights Issues'
“They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan”
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan by Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng and Benjamin Ajak with Judy A. Bernstein
In the introduction, Judy Bernstein compares the situation that the three ‘lost boys’ of this title have been through as analogous to that of the novel Lord of the Flies. I liked this because you are reading this book for your English II Honors class and Lord of the Flies is required reading during the sophomore year. Once you have read both of these books, I think you’ll have great class discussions on the ideas of whether individuals need to be governed—whether they behave differently if they know that there is no policeman (or policewoman) on the corner, keeping them in line.
The three young men who tell their stories here are brothers and a cousin from ‘Dinka Land’ in the Sudan. They walked a 1,000 mile journey to the safety of a refugee camp in Kenya. (The map in the book is very helpful.) One of the first things that the lost boys did when they came to the United States (to San Diego, CA) was buy journals and write their stories. They begin with ordinary life in their villages—coming-of-age rituals of being circumcised, daily meals, caring for animals, the relationships between husbands and wives. As rumors of war spread, the boys are instructed on how to hide when the government soldiers come through the village. Eventually, the villages are raided and the boys lose track of their parents and other family members. They are on their own, trying to make it to safety.
Their trips—both together and separately, in the company of soldiers or with groups of similar lost boys—are circuitous. As the reader, I wondered about the long-term effects of their having witnessed so much death—murder, kids stepping on land mines, bombs going off in other kids’ hands. I wonder how they survived starvation and death from lack of water on numerous occasions. I also thought that, at your age, you may not have heard of some of the more awful things the book addresses, such as female circumcision.
If you are very moved by this book, you may enjoy reading A Long Way Gone, which I’ve reviewed on this blog. The boy in that book did not escape the rebel soldiers (as the three in this book managed to do), so his story is a bit different. He is forced to become a soldier as a mere child and to brutally murder villagers. The veteran soldiers keep him and other boys drugged all the time, so that they don’t have a real awareness of what they are doing.
Both books give us an idea of what war is really like when it is happening in your own backyard.
Add comment May 29, 2010
“Fast Food Nation”
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
Though I’d read several books about food in the last few years, I missed this one. So when it came up as a choice for summer reading in the English II Honors class, I thought I’d try it as well.
Fast Food Nation follows a tradition of muckraking journalism—it takes a problem, reports on it in depth, and hopes that through education, people will come together and demand change. I recommend reading the paperback edition because there is a section about the blowback from the original book. It made some very powerful people very angry. Also—don’t let the length of the book scare you. The last 100 pages are just the notes and bibliography.
Fast Food Nation begins by making interesting connections between the American Dreams of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc, one of the founders (the man who started the franchise we know today) of McDonald’s and goes on to discuss those of Carl Karcher (founder of Carl’s Jr.). Schlosser shows the darker side of these men as well as the energy, hard work, and vision that each needed to make his dream come true. (If your understanding of Walt Disney is completely rosy, and you are interested, you can find documentation of the other side in any biography written in the last 15 years—his involvement in fast food in minor. So FFN doesn’t spend too much time on him.)
Well, unfortunately, some big dreams turn into nightmares, and fast food dreams came to cause many problems across the nation. As McDonald’s and Ronald McDonald became the most recognized brand and character across the country, Americans ate more and more fast food, becoming fatter and fatter—and thus unhealthy in many ways. Schlosser discusses some of the social forces that are involved as well—with both parents working outside the home, often no one feels like cooking.
The sections of the book on teenage employees and how easy it is to create an uneducated, low-wage, benefits-free work force are interesting, as is the successful efforts of McDonald’s to keep workers from unionizing, and fast food employers’ ability to get millions of dollars in federal funds (yeah, taxpayers’ money) to train their workers while mechanizing jobs so that no training is necessary. There’s also the outrage of vegetarians and Hindu people over beef stock in French fires (it makes them taste better) as well as how fast food production has eliminated that American icon, the cowboy on the range. But the part of the book that really had people upset—that caused attacks on Schlosser’s credibility—was the section on the meat-packing industry. This feels like a flashback to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. (A comparison of the two books would make a great class project.)
The speed with which cattle are killed and processed has risen exponentially. A job that once required the skill of a butcher is done in assembly-line fashion. Large meat-packing corporations advertise for workers in Mexico, who come to the jobs (legally or illegally). They have no health insurance, and the injury rate is very high. Injured workers are ‘kicked to the curb’ and new ones replace them. Reading this section of the book makes you think that working in meat packing must be one of the worst jobs in the world. But the part that makes you sick is that, due to the speed and lack of training in butchering, when cattle are disemboweled, feces sprays on the meat which is later ground in and arrives in your fast food hamburgers. That’s one reason why E. coli started breaking out, leading to illness and death. In addition, sick cows are killed, dirty meat and blood from the floor is mixed in with the final product. While this section of the book is stomach-turning, it’s also riveting—you can’t stop reading.
And there’s a great lesson. Although people have tried through government to pass laws to change the industry (pretty unsuccessfully—meat packers donate a lot of money to conservative legislators, and one who was vital to these decisions at the time the book was written was married to a woman on the board of the largest meat packer in the world), what has worked much better is to stop eating at fast food places. When business declines, they make changes to bring it back.
Add comment May 25, 2010
“The Rock and the River”
The Rock and the River
by Kekla Magoon
1968: Racial tensions are escalating in cities across America, including fourteen-year-old Sam’s hometown of Chicago. The struggle for racial equality has even divided Sam’s own family—his father is a civil rights activist, but Sam’s older brother, Stephen, a.k.a. Stick, has joined the Black Panthers. Sam respects his father, but as he sees an increasing number of violent acts perpetrated by whites against blacks, he begins to think that Stick has the right idea. Author’s note.
JLG Review: The Rock and the River provides a fresh take on the civil rights movement. Rather than writing only about the division between blacks and whites, debut author Kekla Magoon concentrates on a less-explored aspect of the time period, the split between blacks who practiced nonviolent resistance and those who attempted violent revolution.
NOTE: COHS Titans–The above review is excerpted from the Junior Library Guild. (Meaning that I didn’t write it and don’t want to take credit from something I didn’t do!) We belong to the Junior Library Guild and purchase four books from them each month, so we have access to these reviews. I’m going to start posting excerpts from the reviews in the hope that you will see what great books we get from JLG–and come check them out! If you want to read the whole review, ask your English teacher. I have made copies for him or her to post in the classroom.
Add comment April 21, 2009
“The Post-American World”
“The Post-American World” by Fareed Zakaria Perhaps I’m feeling too much like ‘Chicken Little” (“The sky is falling!”), but lately I’ve been drawn to books about the future of both the world and the United States. Thankfully, I’ve generally enjoyed reading them, as I find their assertions to be thought-provoking without being alarmist. I also think that they would be very useful for a debate or an ‘issue’ paper. So it is with “The Post-American World,” a book that provides rich detail about the future of the world and the United States’ place in that future—economic, political and cultural.
I know the author’s work from reading copies of “Newsweek” magazine where Zakaria is an editor and consistently contributes articles on international issues. The title of “The Post-American World” sounds alarming, but Zakaria’s take on the future is very positive—provided that we don’t panic and remember that America has adapted to change before and has learned to excel. Zakaria argues that the United States is not ‘racing to the bottom,’ but that other countries are coming up in the world to be on more equal footing with America—and that’s a good thing because it takes people out of poverty and desperation. Excellent topics of research and discussion in this book include the rise of both India and China. India is an ‘inefficient’ democracy—as all democracies are because people can’t be told what to do by a dictating government. China on the other hand, though embracing capitalism in the last twenty years as an economic system, is still a dictatorship, willing to use brutal tactics in the name of progress and efficiency. Zakaria shows the reader why ‘inefficient democracies’ can continue to grow and succeed in changing times.
Another topic that would make a great argument for a history class project is what the United States should do to secure its future (and how it must be unlike Britain of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries)–not as a unipolar world power but as a legitimate broker of world power, the ally that is the hub in a wheel of nations, connected to the US through spokes of diplomacy.
Add comment January 21, 2009
“In Our Own Best Interest”
“In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Will Help Us All” by William F. Schulz
“In Our Own Best Interest” is a great choice for students concerned about global issues, students who care about what happens to other people and students who are writing or debating on any controversial issue related to these themes—public health and access to it, economic policies, environmental policies and human rights at home and abroad. The author, who was the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA when he wrote the book, obviously believes that people have a moral obligation to care about others. However, the book itself moves beyond this argument to detail the many ‘selfish’ reasons—practical reasons—that working for others’ rights benefits us. Don’t skip the introductions (yes, there are more than one!) because Schulz discusses his interaction with high school students.
In Schulz’s words, here’s what he hopes to achieve with the book:
“I propound here no grand new theory of international relations nor offer revelations about human rights that are unavailable to the avid reader of high-quality newspapers. Rather, this book is intended to reframe the debate about human rights for the intelligent layperson who wants to understand the role of human rights play in the United States and it people. It is designed to take the human rights debate out of the hands of ‘experts’ (on both sides) and make it accessible to the average American. After all, their interests are really at stake here, and it is they who will pay the highest price for American indifference. . . .
“Second, the human rights I treat herein are the traditional civil and political ones, like the right to vote, to express opinions without fear of retaliation, to demand a fair trial, to be free from torture.”
The book includes an appendix that is a directory of human rights organizations.
If you are doing research on human rights, global climate change, foreign policy, economic policy, or the changing business and economic map of the world, other good books to check out (whether you agree with their arguments or wish to refute them!) are “The World is Flat” and “Hot, Flat and Crowed” by Thomas L. Friedman; and “The Post-American World” by Fareed Zakaria. I’m hoping to write a little review of each very soon.
Add comment January 7, 2009
