mcdonough

READS FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

*Home

*Local Calendar

* Things to do    RIGHT NOW!    

*Peace at Home:

Informed opinion

Civil Liberties

Justice/Peace

Eco-justice

*US & World Official contacts

Back in 1928 Erich Maria Remarque confronted us with the image
of the beheaded soldier
still running,
with blood "like a fountain"
spouting from his neck.
That¹s the statue we need
in every park and square
to commemorate what we do so well:
run toward war,
headless.  

Fallen Warrior

Is there no play

To ease the anguish

of a torturing hour?”

-A Midsummer Night’s Dream

READING IN TIME OF WAR

These days I am often asked what I did in Tehran as bombs fell during the Iran-Iraq war. My interlocutors are invariably surprised, if not shocked, when I tell them that I read James, Eliot, Plath and great Persian poets like Rumi and Hafez. Yet it is precisely during such times, when our lives are transformed by violence, that we need works of imagination to confirm our faith in humanity, to find hope amid the rubble of a hopeless world. Memoirs from concentration camps and the gulag attest to this. I keep returning to the words of Leon Staff, a Polish poet who lived in the Warsaw ghetto: "Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all." 

Azar Nafisi, Words of War in the NYT, March 27, 2003.  (complete article)

Aristophanes, Lysistrata

Bulgakov, Mikhail,  The Master and Margarita

Camus, Albert, The Plague

Euripides, The Trojan Women

Gandhi, Mohandas K., History of My Experiments with Truth. Commentary, Biography or Fiction about Satyagraha in India:  Shirer, William L., Gandhi, A Memoir; Easwaran, Eknath, A Man to Match His Mountains: Badshah Khan, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam; Rao, Raja, Kanthapura.  As an antidote to unbridled idealism: Mehta, Ved, Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles.

Homer, The Iliad & The Odyssey

Lee, Harper,  To Kill A Mockingbird

Mahfouz, Naguib,  The Cairo Trilogy: The Palace Walk,  Palace of Desire  Trilogy , and Sugar Street.

Markandaya, Kamala, Nectar in a Sieve

Miller, Arthur, The Crucible.  Miller's letter to the Guardian about political repression in the US. Al Filreis' "50's Reading List."

Orwell, George, 1984.

Remarque, Enrich Maria, All Quiet on the Western Front

Rushdie, Salman,  The Satanic Verses : A Novel; Moor's Last Sigh. 

Singh, Khushwant, Train to Pakistan

Thoreau, Henry David, Civil Disobedience

Trumbo, Dalton,  "Johnny Got His Gun":  Listen to this radio adaptation from Pacifica. (This anti-war novel was first published two days after World War II began. Although it was not banned, the author and publisher voluntarily agreed to stop reprints until after the war ended.)

Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace

See LouisvillePeace's Poetry page

READ AND RELEASE PROGRAM