Gene Taft
Perseus Speakers Bureau
Cell phone: 917/701-4072
Landline: 301/593-0766
Email: PerseusSpeakersBureau@gmail.com

You know who bugs me? Tyler Perry. He makes movies. You know he makes movies because all his movies have Tyler Perry’s in the title.  Tyler Perry’s Medea Goes to Jail.  Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys. What’s the thinking here?  Is it really necessary to brand Tyler Perry’s Medea Goes to Jail so it won’t be confused with all the other movies called Medea Goes to Jail? Nope: it’s an affectation.  Alfred Hitchcock didn’t give us Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.  Ingmar Bergman didn’t title his masterpiece Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. You never see a movie called William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  Okay, I take that back, there was a movie called William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but that’s only because it wasn’t William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But Tyler Perry’s House of Pain? I’m sorry.  Maybe this fellow makes wonderful movies, but I for one will never know because I find his titles so irritating I’ve never seen one of his movies, and I never will.

Another trivial annoyance of daily life in the Bay Area: Chip Johnson.  Johnson is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and every day he writes the same column. The words may differ, the details may vary slightly, but it’s always a column about how terrible Oakland mayor Ron Dellums is.  As far as I can tell, that’s his one and only topic.  How small is a person whose life consists entirely of following one other guy around and carping at him?  And does such a midget really deserve a daily column?  Enough, Chip!  We got your point a hundred columns ago! 

And while we’re in the Bay Area mode, let me bring up another local topic: Forty Niners quarterback Shaun Hill.  From 2004 through 2008, the Niners won 18 games and lost 46: not good.  But if you subtract the ten games in which Shaun Hill played quarterback, their record was an even more dismal 11 and 43.  If you look only at the games in which Shaun Hill played quarterback, their record was a fairly astounding 10 and 3.  Without Hill, they won 21% of the time. With Hill, they won 70% of the time.  I guess we know who their starting quarterback will be next year–right? Wrong.   Other than Gwen Knapp, most sports pundits around here are saying: if Hill is so good, how come he was a third-string benchwarmer for so long?   Mike Singletary, the team’s new coach, declares that Hill shouldn’t think he can just waltz into the job: next year he’ll have to compete with Alex Smith, and God help him if he doesn’t look good in practice.  Why on earth would a coach prefer a guy who looks good in practice to a guy who wins actual games?  If anyone figures this out, let me know. 

Which brings me to one last sports topic. Golden State Warriors coach Don Nelson has gone ’round the bend.  I’m sorry, but someone had to say it.  Nelson has always been zany; now he seems cracked. All  year, one Warriors rookie after another has had a breakout game, scoring countless points, blocking shots, dazzling the crowds, looking like a potential superstar.  Bellinelli.  Morrow. Randoph. Watson. Others.  Each time, within a week, that rookie has ended up in “Nelson’s dog house” and has not gotten back into a game until he has shown himself contrite.  Contrite for what?  More evidence: in mid-season, Nelson suddenly decided he wasn’t going to coach defense anymore. He’d appoint a sub-coach to specialize in that aspect of the game–which is unheard of in basketball and for a very good reason: a basketball team switches between offense and defense about every 12 seconds!  Then, for no apparent reason, Nelson declared that he was going to get rid of Jamal Crawford next year–Crawford who has been rock solid throughout the year and downright brilliant many times. Why would a coach make an announcement like that with a month to go in the season?  I think there’s something wrong with Nelson.  Anyone else see it?

 Coming May 4, 2009, from Public Affairs.

World history is the story of how we got to here and now. Necessarily, therefore, the shape of the narrative depends on who is meant by “we” and what is meant by “here-and-now.” People in the West share a common narrative of world history that runs from the Nile Valley and Mesopotomia, through Greece and Rome, to the rise of the secular state and the triumph of democracy; but this story largely omits an entire civilization, one that until recently saw itself at the center of world history and whose citizens have shared an entirely different narrative of world history for a thousand years.

In Destiny Disrupted, Ansary recounts world history as it looks if one assumes (as many do) that the heart of the world is situated somewhere between the Indus and Istanbul and that the pivotal event of human history was the birth of Islam. The narrative begins in Mesopatomia and the Persian highlands and moves through the tumultous drama of Prophet Mohammed’s life and the struggles among his immediate successors, one through the ebb and flow of great Muslim empires, and into a modern age dominated by Western powers and cultures. 

The book illuminates why two great civilizations grew up almost totally oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe—a place long perceived by Muslims as primitive and disorganized—had somehow hijacked destiny. Written for a popular readership, Destiny Disrupted entertains as it enlightens, offering a sweeping perspective on conflicts in the news today.

To pre-order Destiny Disrupted, A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, go here or here or here.
 

Praise for Destiny Disrupted

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, says:

“Ansary has written an informative and thoroughly engaging look at the past, present and future of Islam. With his seamless and charming prose, he challenges conventional wisdom and appeals for a fuller understanding of how Islam and the world at large have shaped each other. And that makes this book, in this uneasy, contentious post 9/11 world, a must-read.”

Reza Aslan, author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam says,

“This is a marvelous book. Ansary has written an indispensable historical account of the last 1,500 years from a perspective that is all too often ignored in the West. Destiny Disrupted will be read for generations to come.”

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, says

“There’s not a page where you won’t learn something startling in Destiny Disrupted. Beautifully clear and endlessly engaging, it’s a romp through science, poetry, politics, and religion, in the company of a wise and charming mind, the perfect antidote to the Islamophobia that clouds Europe and North America.”
                       

Sunday, October 4
West Hollywood, CA
West Hollywood Book Fair 
A panel discussion with Reza Aslan about Islam, the Middle East, and music.
647 N. San Vicente Blvd.
For information, see http://www.westhollywoodbookfair.org/
3 pm

Wednesday, October 21
San Francisco, CA
Booksmith
Book launch for The Widow’s Husband, a novel.  
1644 Haight STreet  
7:30 pm
For information, call (415) 586-3733 or visit http://www.bird-beckett.com/
 

Saturday, October 24
Santa Rosa, CA
Redwood Writers Conference
Keynote speech (”Your Life as Story”) & memoir workshop.
Flamingo Conference Resort
2777 Fourth Street
8:30 – Keynote speech
10:45 – Memoir workship
For conference details: http://www.redwoodwriters.org/conference.html

Thursday, November 5
San Francisco, CA
World Affairs Council of Northern California
312 Sutter Street, Suite 200 
6 pm
For information, contact: nhawkins@wacsf.org

Ansary’s literary memoir tells the story of a life that straddles the fault line between Islam and the West: his father, hailing from an ancestral line rich in Sufi mystics, was one of the first ten Afghans sent abroad by his government for a Western-style education; and hIs mother was the first American woman to marry an Afghan and live in Afghanistan as an Afghan. Ansary and his sister Rebecca were thus the first Afghan-Americans.

Ansary sketches “the Lost World”— Afghanistan before contact with the West, a world of tightly-knit clans living in large compounds surrounded by high walls in a large city that is really a densely interwoven fabric of private villages permeated by Islam. His story then moves to tiny Lashkargah, headquarters of an American aid project in southwestern Afghanistan, eight square blocks of any California suburb transported to the banks of a river in Afghanistan, a mile upstream from the ruins of a thousand-year-old city and surrounded by a desert wasteland stretching to the horizon on every side. Here, Ansary begins a dual life—Afghan by day, American by night.

The author goes on to explore the theme of bifurcated cultural identity as his story moves to United States, to the sixties counterculture, to travels across North Africa and Turkey, and finally to the psychological journey that Afghan refugees and exiles have gone through in America since the Soviets invaded their country.

Go here to order your copy of West of Kabul, East of New York.
Richard Eder, writing for the New York Times, calls West of Kabul, East of New York “a book that steadies our skittering compass. Pointing east and west it signals not galactic opposites but two ends of a needle we can hold in our hand. … It speaks with modesty of tone and is all the more resonant for that reason; it searches by sifting… His book sees things we cannot make out, and need to.”

John Nichols, writing for the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, says, “West of Kabul, East of New York is … not a polemic of globalization or imperialism. In fact, it is essentially an autobiography. Yet, in his exploration of the Afghanistan he knew as a youth and of the practice of Islam to which he was exposed there, he opens vast horizons of understanding… about the price of progress in this perhaps too modern world.”

Roger Downey writes in the Seattle Weekly, “Ansary’s authorial voice is so unemphatic, so over-a-beer conversational that you’re surprised to find tears rising or rage beginning to choke you as you learn about the interminable geopolitical catastrophe that is the author’s birthplace. … West of Kabul, East of New York is one of those rare pieces of journalism–Rebecca West’s dispatches from Nuremberg come to mind, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima—that don’t just record history but make it.”

Jessie Thorpe, writing for United Press International, calls Ansary a “gifted storyteller,” and goes on to say: “Woven into his stories are lucid explanations of Islam, the history of Afghanistan, the heroes of his youth, what school was like in bare classrooms with no books, how women lived, the joys and cruelties of Islamic society — all of it highly educational and absolutely painless to absorb. In addition to ‘speaking’ beautifully, this author is capable of painting large colorful canvases with his words.”

West of Kabul, East of New York has been included on the following lists:

• Favorite Books of 2002 by Amazon.com
• Best Books of 2002 by Christian Science Monitor
• Best Adult Books for High School Students, by The School Library Journal
• Recommended pick for the week of April 4, 2003, by the New York Times
• Favorite Book Picks for 2002 selection by Written Voices (Online Book Review)
• Recommended Readings Archives, Queens Borough Public Library
• Best Books of the Year in 2002 by the San Jose Mercury

It has also been chosen as:

• Common freshman reading selection by Carleton College, Temple University, Albion College, La Guardia Community College, Tulane University, and others.
• New Hampshire Reads selection (April 2003).
• One City One Book selection for the city of Waco, Texas (2004).
• One City One Book selection for the city of Orland, Illinois (2005).
• One City One Book selection for the city of San Francisco (2008)