Some People Need Killing: a Memoir of Murder in My Country - by Patricia Evangelista.- 2023 - 429 Pages

 Some People Need Killing: a Memoir of Murder in My Country - by Patricia Evangelista.- 2023 - 429 Pages

"TIME’S #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A “riveting” (The Atlantic) account of the Philippines’ state-sanctioned killings of its citizens under President Rodrigo Duterte, hailed as “a journalistic masterpiece” (The New Yorker)

 

“Tragic, elegant, vital . . . Evangelista risked her life to tell this story.”—Tara Westover, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Educated

 

FINALIST FOR THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY’S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, Chicago Public Library, CrimeReads, "

Rodrigo Duterte 

Born: March 28, 1945 (age 79)

Presidential term: June 30, 2016 – June 30, 2022

 President of the Philippines (2016–2022), Mayor of Davao City (2013–2016), Vice-Mayor of Davao City (2010–2013), Mayor of Davao City (2001–2010), 

Education: San Beda College of Law (1968–1972), Lyceum of the Philippines University (1968), Cor Jesu College, Inc., Ateneo de Davao University Grade School, Laboon Elementary 

Some People Need Killing: a Memoir of Murder in My Country - by Patricia Evangelista.- 2023 - is a masterpiece on numerous levels.  As reportage of the war on drugs of Rodrigo Duterte (an estimated 20,000 people died in extrajudicial killings), an account of the impact of working as a reporter on the drug war on a relatively highly educated young woman, a brilliant account of the use of Orwellian "Double Speak", a presentation of life among the poorest in the Philippines and a history lesson weaved into the structure of the book.

(A good summary of the war on drugs can be found at

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_drug_war)

I wish or feel a need to convey my own history with the Philippines.

I am an American,  I grew up in Florida. In 2004 I moved permanently to Quezon City, an area that figures very much in the book. I married a wonderful Filipino lady and became the defacto father of her three daughters.  I sent them to college, the youngest at the same university as Patricia Evangelista.

We lived in a gated walled condo community. Nobody gets in without being screened  by armed guards,The residents are doctors, lawyers, business owners and individuals with substantial private worth.  Our barangay has  numerous similar condo communities and also very impoverished areas,  Nearby are huge beautiful malls with four Starbucks and outlets where you can select your $10,000 dollar purse. You pass children playing in mud puddles and Scary to us looking slums which are far from the ones where the drug killings were focused.

When Roberto Duterte  began his successful campaign for president he stated exactly what his top priority would be, to eliminate drug usage in the Philippines. He stated he would do what ever was necessary to achieve this goal.  He said his objective was to protect Filipino children from drug dealers.  

In our community he had significant support. People wanted a strong leader. Unlike other past presidents he disclosed all his assets and Evangelista makes no suggestions of personal financial corruption. Unlike American politicians in their seventies when asked about his health he said "you name a disease and I probably have it". When then President Donald Trump visited the country he staged an elaborate event and gave a speech praising trump to the sky. After that the Philippines got massive American aid in the form of weapons.

My American family and friends thought the drug killings were everywhere and asked if I was in danger.  I told them if not for TV news we would not even know about the killings.  People reported Street crime was way down.  Once a presentation was given in our community meeting house on the war in drugs in our barangay.  An exact account of those killed was given. As the only foreigner there they asked me  my thoughts. I told them I grew up where there is a significant drug problem but here in our community I see only family focused clean living people and I was shocked by Reports of  millions of drug users,   Most were on a version of meth amphetamines.  The government made no distinctions between a casual user of marijuana and a daily user of heroin. All were considered dangerous to society.

Evangelista goes into personal detail on police who killed for bounty money or because they believed it was the right thing for the country as well as on drug dealers.

From Fully Booked- An excellent source for the book, in several Manila malls

"fearless, powerfully written on-the-ground account of a nation careening into violent autocracy—told through harrowing stories of the Philippines’ state-sanctioned killings of its citizens—from a journalist of international renown

“Tragic, elegant, vital . . . Evangelista risked her life to tell this story.”—Tara Westover, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Educated

“My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.”

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.

The book takes its title from a vigilante whose words seemed to reflect the psychological accommodation that most of the country had made: “I’m really not a bad guy,” he said. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.”

A profound act of witness and a tour de force of literary journalism, Some People Need Killing is also a brilliant dissection of the grammar of violence and an important investigation of the human impulses to dominate and resist."

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company Rappler. Her reporting on armed conflict and disaster was awarded the Kate Webb Prize for exceptional journalism in dangerous conditions. She was a Headlands Artist in Residence, a New America ASU Future Security Fellow, and a fellow of the Logan Nonfiction Program, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Her work has earned local and international acclaim. She lives in Manila

This is a wonderful book.  I am very grateful to Patricia Evangelista for her insights and hard work

Mel Ulm

"A Word" A short story by Carol Shields and Anne Giardini - 12 Pages - Included in The Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 "A Word" A short story by Carol Shields and Anne Giardini - 12 Pages - Included in The Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

(Anne Giardini, OC, OBC, QC, is a Canadian business executive, journalist, lawyer and writer. She is the oldest daughter of late Canadian novelist Carol Shields. Giardini is licensed to practice law in British Columbia (and formerly in Ontario and Washington State). As a journalist, Giardini has contributed to the National Post as a columnist. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with her husband of more than 30 years. They have three grown children. She has written two novels, The Sad Truth about Happiness (2005) and Advice for Italian Boys (2009), both published by HarperCollins. Giardini and her son, Nicholas Giardini, edited Startle and Illuminate (Random House Canada, 2016), a book of Carol Shields' thoughts and advice on writing. Giardini served as the 11th chancellor of Simon Fraser University from 2014 to 2020. Wikipedia)

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

Buriedinprint.com

"A Word" is the 14th story from The Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields upon which I have so far posted upon.  

The story focuses on three adult siblings in the Wood family, two brothers and a sister.  Their not too long ago deceased father, little mention is made of their mother is very much a factor in their lives.  As the story opens Ellen is preparing for a solo violin performance.  One of the brothers repairs guitars.  The family is very into a sense of being elite, depending the best from themselves.

The story makes brilliant use of the juxtaposition of family history to European history:

"Many generations of Woods had worn the gold necklace. Three Woods had been married in it. A Wood had worn it to a funeral mass for Czar Nicholas. A Wood had shaken the hand of the great Schiffmann while wearing it. A Wood had hidden it behind a plaster wall in the city of Berlin. Another Wood had carried it out of Spain in 1936 sewn into the hem of a blanket."

Here is the account of the start of the concert:

"Elke had just arrived in the wings when the lights were dimmed and the noise from the audience thinned to a softer sound. She stood, bent slightly forward, with one arm crooked around the violin and the bow held lightly in the opposite hand. Under the surprising folds of the costume, which she now realized smelled strongly of mothballs and dust, her body felt cool and determined. It seemed suddenly as though Papa were near—in the chamber of the violin or wrapped around the rosined strings of her bow. But she knew this was only an illusion stirred by the hard lights and the rising excitement. “He’s gone,” she told herself, looking down at the backs of her hands. “I’m sure of that, at least.”

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography

https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html

"Buxton Hill" by Kevin Barry - 10 Pages -included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - An Irish Short Story Month Work

"

"Buxton Hill" by Kevin Barry - 10 Pages -included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - An Irish Short Story Month Work

 Irish Short Story Month XIII 2024

April to ?

I first read a short story by Kevin Barry 12 years ago during Irish Short Story Month in 2012.  Since then I have posted on more of his works, novels and Short Stories.

"Buxton Hill" by Kevin Barry is the 5th story from the collection Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 I have so far posted upon.  I intend to post upon all 18 Stories in the collection.

"Buxton Hill", set in Cork, is a first person account of a man, living in a house converted to a number of apartments.  He is single, is a writer of sorts but hardly a prosperous one. There is not quite a standard plot, much of the story is given up to his observations on the other people living in the house on Buxton Hill.

"J thought he was gone for good. October the 2nd since Toberty’s been seen on the premises. I have four bails of briquettes gone from his back kitchen. The evidence is long destroyed but he’ll have his suspicions and he has a brother in Cork jail for murder. I’m not saying that kind of thing runs in families. I mean runs-in-families is not an area any of us, around this place, want to get involved in. I could go to my father’s house. But there’s more to that"

Kevin Barry is the author of the highly acclaimed novel City of Bohane and two short-story collections, Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. He was awarded the Rooney Prize in 2007 and won the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award in 2012. For City of Bohane, he was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award and the Irish Book Award, and won the Author’s Club Best First Novel Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. He lives in County Sligo in Ireland.

Whether you are just getting started in Irish Short Stories or have been an 

avid reader for fifty years, Cook Stories, published by Doire Press, will delight you with 18 Stories.

The best way to purchase this marvelous collection is via the Publisher Doire Press 

https://www.doirepress.com

"The Metaohor is Dead" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 2 Pages -included in The Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

Buriedinprint.com

"The Metaphor is Dead" is the 13th story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted. At only two pages it is the briefest work so far and one of the strangest.

There is no real plot, the entire story is given over to a professor holding forth on what he sees as the decay of literature.

"THE METAPHOR IS DEAD,” bellowed the gargantuan professor, his walrus mustache dancing and his thundery eyebrows knitting together rapaciously. “Those accustomed to lunching at the high table of literature will now be able to nosh at the trough on a streamlined sub minus the pickle. Banished is that imperial albatross, that dragooned double agent, that muddy mirror lit by the false flashing signal like and by that even more presumptuous little sugar lump as. The gates are open, and the prisoner, freed of his shackles, has departed without so much as a goodbye wave to those who would take a simple pomegranate and insist it be the universe."

I will give our professor the last word:

"Initially a toy of the literati,” the fiery professor cried, “the metaphor grew like a polyp on the clean chamber of poetry whose friendly narrative lines had previously lain as simply as knives and forks in a kitchen drawer and whose slender, unjointed nouns, colloquial as onions, became puffed up like affected dowagers, swaying, pelvis forward, into a Victorian parlor of cluttered predicates, where they took to sitting about on the embroidered cushions of metonymy and resting their metered feet on quirky mean-spirited oxymorons."

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography


https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html

Nothing Surer" - A Short Story by Gráinne Murphy - 10 Pages - included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - An Irish Short Story Month Work

 

 "Nothing Surer" - A Short Story by Gráinne Murphy - 10 Pages - included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - An Irish Short Story Month Wor

Irish Short Story Month XIII- 2024

April to June 1

"Nothing Surer"   by Gráinnec Murphy, a resident of West Cork, is the 4th of the 18 short stories in Cork Stories I intend to read and post upon during Irish Short Story Month XIII.

"Nothing Surer" resonated for me in an almost painfully personal manner.

The story centers on the daily life of a widower. He lost his wife, 

his life was built around a few years ago, and now he tries to go on alone.

 "The world gone to holy hell and himself weakening by the new time. Still, if time was a curse, routine was the cure. Today just a day like any other. The ball of the hammer was solid against his heel when he sat on the edge of the bed. Shoes on, face the world. Ellen would phone in the afternoon, she’d said." 

He seems about 70, people treat him in a kindly but patronising fashion.

It is Halloween. When Aine was alive and Ellen their child young, he always carved a pumpkin.  Today he will visit her grave.

"The hill up to the graveyard was slow going but pleasant enough, with the seagulls perched on the rigging of the boats and shouting out everything they could see. Áine loved that sound, she told him, when they were walking home from a dance early in their courting. ‘The lonesomeness of it makes me feel dramatic,’ she said, linking his arm. The vodka and orange was showing on her. ‘Bury me where I can hear seagulls.’ ‘I will,’ he said, where another man might have thought her forward to be imagining her future with him in it.  The graveyard gate opened silently. He closed it. Opened it again."

My wife passed away long before she should have two years ago.

These lines are perfectly expressive of my feelings, my cherished hope to be reunited with my wife:

"He took out the brush and gathered the biscuit crumbs into a tidy heap in the corner, where the dustpan made short work of them. A man on his own had to keep the place right. He didn’t want Áine arriving back to collect his soul for heaven, only to be distracted by inches of dust on the mantelpiece. She would insist on cleaning everything, wasting precious minutes in the hereafter. Were the minutes still precious if they were infinite? He could be finding out."

"Gráinne grew up in Kilmichael, in rural county Cork. At university, she studied Applied Psychology, then forensic research, where she worked as a research assistant. Switching to human resources, Gráinne worked in training and development for several years before moving to Belgium with her family. While in Brussels, Gráinne began to work as a self-employed proofreader, primarily working with research consultancies in the areas of human rights and environmental issues. She returned to Ireland in 2016 and now lives near the West Cork coast with her family, where she continues to work as a copy editor.

Since 2012, Gráinne has been writing both long and short fiction. Her work often reflects her interest in family and identity, in those bittersweet moments where we have to stare life down and choose who we want to be.  

A winner of the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair 2019, Gráinne’s novels have been shortlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award 2019 and Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award 2019 and longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2018 and Mslexia Novel Award 2017. Her short stories have appeared in the Fish Anthology 2020, RiPPLE Anthology 2017 and Nivalis 2015. 

Gráinne’s short story Further West, was longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in May 2021.

Gráinne’s debut novel Where the Edge Is was published by Legend Press in September 2020. The Ghostlights was published in 2021, followed by Winter People in 2022. Greener will be published in Spring 2024. All are published by Legend Press."

From https://www.grainnemurphy.ie/writing/about-me

Whether you are just getting started in Irish Short Stories or have been an 

avid reader for fifty years, Cook Stories, published by Doire Press, will delight you with 18 Stories.

The best way to purchase this marvelous collection is via the Publisher Doire Press 

https://www.doirepress.com

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life

Stolen Words The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books by Mark Glickman - 2016 - 344 Pages

 Stolen Words The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books by Mark Glickman - 2016 - 344 Pages is a beautiful, brilliant book.  I offer my great thanks to Rabbi Glickman for sharing so much essential knowledge about Jewish traditions and the efforts of the Nazis to destroy Jewish Culture with us,

"Stolen Words is an epic story about the largest collection of Jewish books in the world—tens of millions of books that the Nazis looted from European Jewish families and institutions. Nazi soldiers and civilians emptied Jewish communal libraries, confiscated volumes from government collections, and stole from Jewish individuals, schools, and synagogues. Early in their regime the Nazis burned some books in spectacular bonfires, but most they saved, stashing the literary loot in castles, abandoned mine shafts, and warehouses throughout Europe. It was the largest and most extensive book-looting campaign in history.

 

After the war, Allied forces discovered these troves of stolen books but quickly found themselves facing a barrage of questions. How could the books be identified? Where should they go? Who had the authority to make such decisions? Eventually the military turned the books over to an organization of leading Jewish scholars called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc.—whose chairman was the acclaimed historian Salo Baron and whose on-the-ground director was the philosopher Hannah Arendt—with the charge of establishing restitution protocols.

 

Stolen Words is the story of how a free civilization decides what to do with the material remains of a world torn asunder, and how those remains connect survivors with their past. It is the story of Jews struggling to understand the new realities of their post-Holocaust world and of Western society’s gradual realization of the magnitude of devastation wrought by World War II. Most of all, it is the story of people —of Nazi leaders, ideologues, and Judaica experts; of Allied soldiers, scholars, and scoundrels; and of Jewish communities, librarians, and readers around the world."  From Nebraska University Press  - the Publisher 

Most people know the Nazis burned Jewish Books but my guess is few know that they stole millions of books from Jewish collections and individuals. Their purpose was to use them to document their fantasies about Jewish plots and to place the works in a planned museum of Jewish culture to be built  after a victory which never happened.

Glickman describes Germany as a country that respected the power of books.  That is why they were so concerned to capture Jewish Books. Likewise he details the great importance of studying the written word in Jewish History as well as the widespread love of books in Eastern European and Russian Jewish communities.

He takes us way back in Jewish and German history and ends up  with his experiences teaching in a summer camp for teenagers on Jewish culture 

Rabbi Mark Glickman has served at congregations in Ohio, Washington State, and Colorado. He is the author of Sacred Treasure—The Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic.

"Fragility" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - included in The Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

"Fragility"- A Short Story by Carol Shields - included in The Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004
 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

Buriedinprint.com

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography 

"Fragility" is the 12th Short Story by Carol Shields I have the great pleasure of reading.

As the story opens a couple married some twenty years are on a plane, flying over the Rocky Mountains on their way to Vancover..  They are moving there because the husband has been transferred, they are searching for a house to buy,   in January their son died at age 15.

It is not easy to bring a 20 year marriage to life in nine pages but Shields does it brilliantly.

"WE ARE FLYING OVER THE ROCKIES on our way to Vancouver, and there sits Ivy with her paperback. I ask myself: Should I interrupt and draw her attention to the grandeur beneath us? In a purely selfish sense, watching Ivy read is as interesting as peering down at those snowy mountains. She turns the pages of a book in the same way she handles every object, with a peculiar respectful gentleness, as though the air around it were more tender than ordinary air. I’ve watched her lift a cup of tea with this same abstracted grace, cradling a thick mug in a way that transforms it into something precious and fragile."

We follow them as a real estate agent shows them  numerous houses.

Like her other stories the prose is exquisite and the wisdom from a deep source.