All Of Us Living In Today's World

In His Fierce, Bold Determination To See The Lives Of Modern-day Slaves Up Close, Benjamin Skinner Reminds Me Of The British Abolitionist Of Two Hundred Years Ago, Zachary Macaulay, Who Once Traveled On A Slave Ship Across The Atlantic, Taking Notes. Skinner Goes Everywhere, From Border Crossings To Brothels To Bargaining Sessions With Dealers In Human Beings, To Bring Us This Vivid, Searing Account Of The Wide Network Of Human Trafficking And Servitude Which Spans Today's Globe.

You Know, By 1936, Hitler Was Already Talking Very Loudly About His Desire To Expand To The East. Mussolini, In 1935, Went And Then In The Next Year, Conquered Ethiopia, Acquiring Himself A Colony. So People At The Time Really Saw Fascism Not Just As An Evil But As An Aggressive Evil That Seemed To Be Spreading.

Things Have Gotten Openly More Extreme In The Last Few Years. I Was Lecturing In Hungary, Whose Prime Minister, Victor Orban, Is An Example Of This Trend. All Over Budapest, Statues Have Been Replaced, Museum Exhibits Have Been Redone, To Turn Ethnic Hungarians, Not Jews, Into The Prime Victims Of The Germans During World War Ii. Five Years Ago, Who Would Have Thought This Possible?

One Of My Favourite Contemporary Fiction Writers Is A Texan, Ben Fountain. His Extraordinary Novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-time Walk, All Takes Place Within The Half-time Show At A Dallas Cowboys Football Game. No One Has Better Summed Up The American Appetite For Spectacle, The Link Between Sports And Politics, And The Absolute Madness Of George W. Bush's Iraq War.

How Many Really Great Writers Are There Who Are Totally Non-political? You Can Hear The French Revolution In The Poetry Of [percy Bysshe] Shelly And [john] Wordsworth; You Can Sense The Vast Inequalities Of Tsarist Russia In [anton] Chekhov And [lev] Tolstoy.