Wonder What It’s Like To Be Near Death?

Remember those winter mornings when you cursed your office’s less-than-adequate heating system, only to grumble and sweat out the weak A.C. come summer-time? Well, imagine this: You’re in the middle of a 3,000 mile solo trek through the Baja desert, unable to quench your thirst as you discover that the last of your water ration has leaked from its bag. But wait! What’s that? Up ahead you spot a wooded area, telegraph poles, civilization! You start running at full speed, even in your weakened state, only to discover that the telegraph poles are dead leafless palm trees and the “civilization” is just an abandoned fishing camp littered with empty bottles and fish carcasses. Your oasis is a mirage… and the temperature is 100degrees.

Is Teach For America the New I-Banking?

Award winning journalist Donna Foote spent a year in the Teach for America trenches in RELENTLESS PURSUIT and now considers whether public service jobs are now gaining the lustre once associated with Wall Street.

Some interesting facts to consider:

* For the past several years, TFA has been one of the top recruiters on some 400 college campuses across the country. Despite its offer of miserly salaries and two years of grueling hard work, it has remained competitive with the Morgan Stanleys and Lehman Brothers of the World, attracting some of the best and the brightest among America’s top graduates.

When One Reviewer Makes the Difference

Hailed as “one of the most important studies on the Holocaust to have appeared in years,” by the Curator of Stanford University’s Judaic and Hebraic Collections, Samuel Kassow’s riveting and monumental work WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY? was all but ignored when published by an academic publisher in July, 2007. However, when Carol Janeway, a Senior Vice President of the Knopf Group, came upon the lone national rave review in The New Repulic exclaiming that WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY is “The most important book about history that anyone will ever read,” she quickly began an easily won crusade to republish Kassow over here.

Poverty Porn, or Best Picture of the Year?

Ranging from record breaking Oscar nominations to an outpouring of protests in Mumbai and controversy in the US, SlumDog millionaire has shed a burning spotlight on what it means to be Indian in the entertainment world today.

Chitra Divakaruni, author of Palace of Illusions, has been painting the airwaves, printed page and online world red with her take on the controversy surrounding SlumDog Millionaire. Read what she has to say:
Los Angeles Times
The New York Times
USA Today