A provocative and deeply thoughtful new novel about a life shaped by the worst horrors of the twentieth century and one man’s attempt to reclaim happiness: A Mad Desire to Dance by Elie Wiesel, translated by Catherine Temerson (Knopf) Elie Wiesel was Chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust until 1986, the year he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Shortly thereafter, he established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He has written more than 40 books, including his memoir Night, which has been translated into more than 30 languages. For his literary and human rights work, Wiesel has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal, the Medal of Liberty, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. A Mad Desire to Dance is a novel that profiles a life shaped by the worst horrors of the 20th-century and one man's attempt to reclaim happiness despite his overwhelming loss.

Doriel, a European expatriate living in New York, suffers from a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a member of the Resistance, survived World War II only to die in an accident, together with his father, soon after. Doriel was a child during the war, and his knowledge of the Holocaust is largely limited to what he finds in movies, newsreels, and books—but it is enough. Doriel’s parents and their secrets haunt him, leaving him filled with longing but unable to experience the most basic joys in life. He plunges into an intense study of Judaism, but instead of finding solace, he comes to believe that he is possessed by a dybbuk.

In the late 1990s in New York, sixty year old Polish Jew Doriel Waldman knows his nightmarish childhood has left him depressed, lonely, and believing he is going insane. He reluctantly turns to psychoanalyst Dr. Therese Goldschmidt for help though he believes the shrink will do nothing to relieve him of his demons. His attitude towards the doctor is belligerent as he rants at her in anger about his youth and his solitary future.

Doriel was born in 1936. He and his father hid from the Nazis during the occupation; his two sisters were less fortunate having been killed by the bastards and he assumes suffered much worse atrocities from these beasts. His mother was part of the Polish underground resistance; ironically, God played quite a trick on the Waldman male survivors when after the war ended she died in an accident. He further explains he feels guilty as a Jew in WW II Europe who cannot even claim being a Holocaust survivor even if he was a preadolescent at the time. Therese begins to connect with her angry recalcitrant patient as he begins to understand the traumas that have left him melancholy for five decades and a slight flicker of hope as he returns to his religion for solace but even there he finds the demon inside him.
Surrounded by ghosts, spurred on by demons, Doriel finally turns to Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt, a psychoanalyst who finds herself particularly intrigued by her patient. The two enter into an uneasy relationship based on exchange: of dreams, histories, and secrets. Despite Doriel’s initial resistance, Dr. Goldschmidt helps to bring him to a crossroads—and to a shocking denouement.

In Doriel’s journey into the darkest regions of the soul, Elie Wiesel has written one of his most profoundly moving works of fiction, grounded always by his unparalleled moral compass. This intense look at survivors of traumas years after the events have occurred is an intense superb but extremely difficult tale to read. The audience learns what haunts Doriel (through Therese’s notes) as his memories deleted the good times leaving behind an expanded bad. Fans of Elie Wiesel will appreciate this powerful character driven tale of the long term effects of a trauma on the soul of a survivor. 

The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing by Daniel Bergner (Ecco) How do we come to be who we are sexually? How do we cope with the forces of desire? How can we understand the relationship between the transcendent and the physical, between the wish for love and the anarchy of the erotic?

Daniel Bergner looks for answers in the stories of four people whose longings are very different from our own: a devoted husband burdened by an insatiable foot fetish, a clothing designer who finds ecstasy in the pain of others, a man smitten with his young stepdaughter, and an advertising director who casts traditionally beautiful models but who is attracted only to amputees. Bergner finds in their desires metaphors for the issues that confront us all and raises fascinating questions about the erotic differences between men and women and the nature of ecstasy itself: Are some people actually experiencing more ecstasy than the rest of us?

In speaking to experts in the fields of psychology and neurology, and by threading the personal stories of several modern-day Kinseys throughout his riveting case studies, Bergner has written a provocative, profoundly insightful, and brilliantly illuminating book about the most fundamental of human needs.  

A foot fetishist, a female sadist, a child molester and an amputee "devotee" — these are the protagonists of Daniel Bergner's new book The Other Side of Desire, an exploration into various atypical forms of "lust and longing." In what could have been the worst kind of leering anthropology, Bergner instead finds compassion, sympathy and even commonality. He calls the stories in the book "autobiographical," and the book makes clear that its subjects will provide all of us with convex mirrors reflecting our own sexual desires and practices.

Even amid the sometimes-destructive impact of what sexologists call "paraphilias" — sexual "disorders" that most of society (and this interviewer too, accidentally) often call deviant — Bergner also envies the intensity of feeling that accompanies them.

Bergner's book is an exploration of the people, stories and science behind paraphilias. It raises the questions of where our desires come from and what to do with them once they're there, but Bergner (and the scientists he cites) know that there are no easy answers. An adapted excerpt from his book entitled "What Do Women Want?" appeared recently as a cover story for the New York Times Magazine, but, like The Other Side of Desire as a whole, it's more concerned with exploring our questions about sexuality than with resolving them. Anecdote, authorial intuition and scientific research all tell us that sex might just be as big a mystery as we always thought it was.

I sat down with Bergner the other day and got him talking on his hunches about nature versus nurture, on whether porn hurts or helps, on what inspired or scared him and on the redemptive power of love. More about Daniel and his work can be found at danielbergner.com.  

Sex and sexuality tend to prompt so much gawking, I was impressed that your book moved beyond the anthropological and became quite intimate.
I feel like these stories are autobiographical, though that may sound strange to say. They are about states of longing, and they are about people fighting cultural constraints, cultural codes. Even for the most mainstream of us experience those things — think about the monogamous rules of marriage. Dismiss Freud if you like, but we all have an erotic layer, a powerful force inside us, a central force. And whatever we do with it — push it to the side, tamp it or live with it consciously — we are dealing with constraints and codes. Here are four really dramatic examples, and I felt in their stories a way to get to something, to some deeper understanding.

You continually address the question of inherency — nature versus nurture. Do you think that people are born quote-unquote deviants, with hardwired inclinations, or are they triggered culturally or experientially?
How we come to be who we are sexually was a question I wanted to address, not only by spending time with scientists but by telling stories. I spent time with scientists who were going so far as to take MRI images of the brain and literally point to distinctions in certain areas that they felt were correlating to differences in erotic direction. But the impact of culture is also clear in large and small ways. At the other end of the extreme of the debate is a really interesting set of studies by an anthropologist who spent time in Papua New Guinea and watched young men grow from homosexual relationships to heterosexual ones according to a sort of cultural script. His research points to the malleability of who we are sexually. On a much more personal note, I spent time in a lot of alternate sexual worlds with people who just see sex differently than I do. There was an almost immediate effect on me after spending a weekend among them: I would begin to see as they see. It wasn't a complete change — I'm still basically the vanilla guy that I am — but it does have its effect. You can feel how we're affected by our surroundings.

Does porn help a child molester like Roy keep from acting on his impulses, or does porn encourage him?
Let's back up a little and talk about pornography in general. Porn can be incredibly liberating because it gives a sort of affirmation; it's a sexual mirror of society, in a way. The only thing that makes me worry, and I say this tentatively, is the solitary nature of it. In Jacob the foot fetishist's story, his shame just feeds on itself; he becomes more and more solitary, and of course if he were to just bring his desire for feet into his otherwise perfectly thriving marriage, he and his wife might be brought closer. I worry that pornography just serves the solitary and maybe doesn't get us to the place that Ron and Laura get to. Now in cases like Roy's, the thinking about porn is complicated. There's a big debate among experts who treat child molesters about whether pornography gives them a safe outlet or feeds their desire. It is such a raging debate; for me to weigh in would be silly.

Then there's the question of rape in general and whether pornography encourages rapists or helps satisfy would-be rapists.
I want to be really careful here because I don't want to be advocating limits on pornography — I think in the balance we'd better keep our free speech and therefore our free access to pornography. But we've got to acknowledge that to some extent pornographic images affect the way we desire, and ultimately to some degree may affect what we do with that desire.

In all the things you were exposed to, did anything give you a stronger sense of how wide the erotic world is or how to expand your own? And did anything scare you?
The easiest thing is to talk about the Baroness' world, because it contains the answer to both questions. There were certainly times with the Baroness when I thought, "No way could I ever do that to someone" — although the word "could" is tricky. I've spent a fair amount of time in war zones, I think we are all capable of doing pretty much anything to anyone, which is frightening.

Daniel Bergner

But there were moments when the erotic force of the Baroness' connection with her submissives seemed revelatory — the kind of revelatory that I would want. When I think about the language of S&M — "surrender," "submit," "overtake," "overwhelm" — it's the language of love. All of our longing is embedded there. When I watched her submissives, I saw something that was enviable. They were being taken to a level of ecstasy that most of us may not experience. There was this one guy who was talking about onion skins being stripped from his psyche. I'll speak for myself: I want to get there. I don't necessarily want to undergo what that man was undergoing, but I do envy that experience. There was something profound happening.

Even beyond that, I saw again and again with the Baroness and the S&M world a level of communication about the sexual. The couple I call "Ben and Eliza" spent a lot of time planning their erotic encounters — which in itself is pretty erotic — and they take each other to places that are pretty deep.

I said to them, "So now this person you love is way down there in a place of submission, perhaps injured physically or psychologically, utterly vulnerable and exposed, but in a state of ecstasy. How does that person get back? How do you walk outside like a regular couple in the world?" And they said they take their lover in their lap and allow them to be reborn, to become their everyday vertical selves. That was very moving to me.

They really sound synched. It makes me want to see the divorce rates of S&M marriages.
It's like they've got it all there: being taken to complete revelation and vulnerability and transcendence and then nurtured back into everyday being.  

And what stuff was the scariest?
Jacob the foot fetishist gets treated by a very compassionate, heroic psychiatrist named Fred Berlin, who has treated men whose sexuality is built around killing women violently, simply put. That is scary. Yet in general, if you take men into the lab, they're going to respond to scenes of coercive sex at the least and probably to violent, coarser sex; there's just no avoiding that data. It is inside us. But it is frightening, and there is something that just shuts down when you talk about inflicting that level of harm.

The other frightening terrain was with Roy. I mean, I spent a year and a half with him, his struggle and his treatment group. His victim's age was that of my daughter's at the time. That made me balk. I had to keep my mind open because I was very intrigued by him and he was so willing to be introspective. He wanted so badly to understand what had happened with him. Coming home to my family was a long trip.

So ultimately did you feel more compassionate about humanity or more fatalistic about our wiring and the hope for us?
Fatalism to me isn't a bad thing. Fatalism to me implies we are who we are, and then the question becomes: Let's understand it more deeply. To me, fatalism and compassion go very much together.

How did Laura, the amputee, ultimately negotiate the synecdoche problem that an amputee has — not being a part for a whole, or a whole for a part?
Laura is a lovely young woman, an army wife, living a town-to-town existence, who in a horrific car accident loses both her legs up near the hip. She feels like her life is over; she literally wants to die. She won't look down, she won't acknowledge what's happened. It's only when they finally get her out of bed for rehab that she has to see it. Her little son asks, "Will your legs grow back?" I shed some tears with her.

Later, when she discovers the amputee-devotee community online, she's torn. She wonders why no surgeons or therapists ever mentioned it to her. What she finds ironic is that the whole therapeutic community is about concealing it. It's about wearing prostheses, even though they're not always magical like in that Dupont commercial with the basketball player. The idea is wear prostheses, wear long, flowing clothing and make yourself look quote-unquote normal! She's thinking on one hand, that makes sense, but she's also thinking: Why can't I be me, why can't I be loved for being me, what does it mean that there are men out there who are attracted to this? Is it just like men who are attracted to large breasts or long legs? Her colleagues start asking about it and ridicule the community, saying they sound sick, but she begins to explore it, she does some modeling actually, some amputee-devotee modeling. So in a way she gets to be a model, which she was always too short to do — now that doesn't matter — and with Ron, the devotee she marries, by her side, she goes back to school and eventually gets to do the other thing she wanted, to work as a therapist. With Ron she feels very fortunate to be with him and very, very loved. I stayed with them, I stayed in the bedroom right across from theirs, I could hear their laughter. It was really touching. But she would also tell me that there are times when she wonders if she could get a "normal" man. She tells herself to stop thinking that way, and what's normal anyway? It preys on her sometimes; there's no way around that question.

Once I was at a dinner party of writers; you'd think everyone would be very open-minded and for the most part they were. But when I told the Ron and Laura story, somebody leapt in and said, "But is his love pure?" I was like, "What love is pure?" We can't separate the physical from the transcendent. It's all of a piece and to try to separate it is to take it further from the transcendent. We are bodies and we are souls, and we are not going to pull them apart. 

The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel by Salman Rushdie (Random House) (paperback) A tall, yellow-haired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence.

The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities, unknown to each other, at the height of their powers–the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power.

Vivid, gripping, irreverent, bawdy, profoundly moving, and completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s most important living writers.

 

From LA Times: What doesn't kill you in the literary world makes you stronger. That's why one has to wonder how Salman Rushdie's literary fortunes would have fared without the infamous fatwa issued against him in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. Of course, it's not polite to consider his career in this way, because it implies that the repugnant and dangerous order against Rushdie's life was also a publicity coup for the novelist. In a single moment, Rushdie, who was best known until then as an award-winning writer of a dazzling and funny book about the creation of India, became a literary and political cause célèbre.

The fatwa utterly changed the trajectory of his career. Not often are integrity and righteousness thrust upon a person, much less a novelist. The fatwa granted Rushdie every artistic permission. He could publish whatever he liked. On one hand, one murmurs yes, and wishes there were more writers who didn't have to abase themselves in the filthy marketplace. But of course, an artist has certain obligations to his art, if not to his readership. Purity of intention and perfection of execution are among them. It's not clear in "The Enchantress of Florence," his new novel, that Rushdie still cares to live up to those.

"The Enchantress of Florence" is in part a historical novel that takes place not only in Florence but also in the Mughal Empire, in Fatipur-Sikri and in Herat. Agostino Vespucci, a blond European traveler and cousin to the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, arrives suddenly at the court of the Mughal emperor, Akbar. To explain why he's come, Agostino tells Akbar a convoluted, exotic tale. He also tells the emperor that they are distant cousins. From this thick and admittedly improbable stew -- told in his habitual high style of magical realism -- Rushdie weaves a baroque fairy tale that takes us from Akbar's empire to Machiavelli's Florence.

In the Florentine and Mughal worlds that Rushdie creates, his magical invention, though unflagging, can feel shopworn and self-indulgent. There is the Mughal artist Dashwanth who disappears into a corner of his own painting; there are mandrake roots that cry out when they are picked (as in " Harry Potter"; this is an old myth about the root); there is an imaginary Pygmalion wife, Jodha, invented by the emperor. Jodha is preeminent among Akbar's harem, a perfect woman who is also his ideal sexual object -- like a grown man's imaginary friend. She is also one of many women in this book portrayed as a desirable object; the enchantress Qara Köz -- "Black Eyes" -- even has a double who is always with her and who is called "The Mirror." With expected inevitability, one of the book's heroes has a threesome with the twinlike girls.

Ago Vespucci, who assumes a role as chief adviser, turns out to be a magician: not just a prestidigitator but also a sorcerer of unimaginable abilities who can conjure up plot twists and resolve them with a wave of his hand. He moves the plot and inspires the characters to action and is figuratively the writer or inventor of the novel, the Prospero of the book, the stand-in for Rushdie. Literary conceits like this slosh around in "Enchantress." Ago, for example, insists -- in a plot twist that is ta-da'd with enormous fanfare -- that he is the son of Akbar's lost great-aunt, the same Qara Köz, a lost princess who historically was merely a beloved, black-eyed wife of Emperor Akbar's ancestor. She eventually becomes, improbably, Rushdie's "hidden princess" and -- carried off to Italy -- the foremost among his many enchantresses of Florence.

The magical realism in "Enchantress" is all artifice and diversion. Its decorative beauty disguises truth, or avoids it, and keeps the reader pointlessly mystified. No style should be a substitute for a story. Plot is the hard work of novel-writing. Rather than dealing with difficult reality, which is the writer's perhaps unpleasant but necessary duty, Rushdie forces Qara Köz from the Mughal Empire into Florence to make a few dubious points, distracting readers from the logistical plot problems in the book's flabby middle. In magical realism as it is practiced by Rushdie, timelines are as naught. Simultaneity is all. This can make the work seem less like great literature and, at moments, more like automatic scribbling.

There are fools and dungeons in "The Enchantress of Florence"; there is a beautiful princess who is eclipsed by a more beautiful princess (as in the Snow White fairy tale -- sometimes, reading along, one feels as if one were in an elaborate Disney world); there are secret vials of magical perfumes; two prostitutes nicknamed Mattress and Skeleton after their physiques; fearless generals and vampires; wicked wives and henpecked husbands; a tamed elephant; walled capitals and peasant fires; slaves, enchanted forests, giants; a tulip-tattooed, long-haired warrior who resembles a member of the rock band Queen more than he does someone from the Renaissance . . . what is there that is not in this book?

What is missing is more of what Rushdie does well. Above all the fog of creation, the emperor stands out like a beacon of sense and decency. A mature and beguiling character, Akbar is at once virile and kind, open and dominating, thoughtful and heroic. One cannot get enough of him. He is the archetype of the virtuous Prince, the benign dictator, and whenever he is present, the book moves along with grace and clarity. Unfortunately, he's not around all the time.

Trying to follow the twisted, discontinuous "plot," one grows irritated with the sprinkling of ostensibly clever sayings that litter the way. Here's one: "He wanted to be able to tell someone his suspicion that men have made their gods and not the other way around." Here's another: "Only when we accept the truths of death can we begin to learn the truths of being alive." One more: "The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike." Brill.

Yet sometimes one longs for the snappy saying. In Florence, Ago finds a woman he adores, but she is now a mute who has stored up the memories of Ago's long-lost orphaned friend. (She is known as the Memory Palace -- many women, including the Memory Palace, the Mattress, the Skeleton, the Mirror and Black Eyes, are known as objects, instead of by their proper names.) Finally, Ago gets her to speak. "[He] knew that his lost friend, the boy without a childhood, was growing up as she spoke, growing up in her telling of him, having whatever it is that children have instead of a childhood when they don't have a childhood, changing into a man, or into whatever a child without a childhood becomes when he grows up, maybe a man without a manhood." This prolixity is not singular. Here's another, even more inane, example: "Because, as the old saying had it, in the court of the Grand Mughal only the humble did not stumble. Nevertheless there was . . . some cause for concern, because underneath the low-level mumble, at an even lower level, he had heard a darker rumble. . . . "

What can one say? The writer bumbles and fumbles, and finally the reader crumbles.

Rushdie has done a lot of research for "Enchantress." Unfortunately, the story gets lost amid its own underpinnings. The reader is asked to do the work the writer usually does: to put the complicated, sporadic, diffuse and often irritating mass of information together and make of it a comprehensible whole. Yet the book is not postmodern, deconstructed or radical -- it's not challenging in a good way. There's an awful lot in its few pages (few for Rushdie, that is). Indeed, there is far too much, and "Enchantress" reads as if it's unedited and unfinished. It's more Rushdie's working notebook for a novel than it is a premeditated work of finished fiction.

Because of its use of mirror imagery, trans-cultural characters, twin settings that reflect our own supposedly clashing civilizations, vivid descriptions of painting and song, and the shadowy, recurring but silent figure of Dashwanth the artist, "Enchantress" also seems to be about how to make art; about the relationship between politics and art (always a subject close to Rushdie's heart); and about the back-and-forth reflections between cultures. About art, politics and culture, however, "Enchantress" mostly hints and insinuates, rather than bringing the reader to some kind of understanding.

Here and there, like tiny sparkling jewels peeking from the vast, fertile loam, are wonderful bits of Rushdie's funny, nervy writing. There are beautiful sections on landscape painting, on combat at sea and on imprisonment, as well as brief, penetrating looks at married life ("His wife waddled. He was married to a waddling wife. He could not imagine touching her private places ever again.") and at the public miracles created by the enchantress.

For some readers, these winks of brilliance unlike any other writer's may be enough to erase the tedium of the narrative. The rest of us will have to hope that Rushdie, who is clearly so amused by his own creation, will work more as a writer and less as a researcher next time, and bring us all under his spell. --Amy Wilentz is the author of the novel "Martyrs' Crossing" and "I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger."

Convergence Journalism: Writing and Reporting across the News Media by Janet Kolodzy (Paperback) (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) Excerpt: Ever since I made the leap from journalism practitioner to journalism teacher in 1998, media prognosticators have been declaring the death of radio, daily newspapers, the network news, journalistic ethics, and even journalism itself. Old media will be replaced by new media. Bloggers will replace journalists. "We media" will replace mainstream media. Yet if anything can be discerned about journalism's future from what has been happening in the first few years of the twenty-first century, it is that this will be a century of change and choice. Journalism of the future will involve all sorts of media: old and new, niche and mass, the personal and the global. It will involve storytelling in every combination of words, pictures, and sound. And it will be propelled not just by journalists but by news audiences. That is already apparent today.

As news audiences' informational needs and wants change, and as they seek more choices in getting that information, journalists will be expected to adapt. So how should they? Convergence has emerged within the past decade as a strategy to respond to the rapid world of media change and choice. Convergence acknowledges that news consumers are gain­ing more control of the news process. That change in the controlling forces of news requires changes in the ways of doing news. Convergence is about being flexible enough to provide news and information to anyone and everyone, anytime and all the time, anywhere and often everywhere without abandoning key journalistic values. Convergence refocuses journal­ism to its core mission—to inform the public about its world in the best ways possible and available. Convergence aims to give news audiences choices by coordinating and cooperating in news-gathering and news presentation.

The emergence of convergence as a different way of thinking and doing journalism led me to seek out how it is being tried in newsrooms and how it could be applied in the class­room. As someone who worked half her professional life for newspapers and half her profes­sional life in broadcast, and who was excited about online's development, I thought convergence had a great deal of potential in building connections and creating more journal­ism choices for news audiences. I understand the pluses and minuses of each medium, hav­ing worked in them. So applying them to the practice and the teaching of journalism should seem simple. It was not.

I quickly learned that convergence means different things to different people, and that con­vergence is a dynamic, evolutionary process. Initial press coverage of Tampa, Florida's, conver­gence efforts alongside stories about megamedia mergers in the late 1990s cemented rather simplistic notions about convergence and how it operates. It became a catchword without much substance or understanding. Convergence in journalism became synonymous with the idea of one person doing it all, and the evils of media consolidation. One purpose for this book is to clarify what convergence is, and is not, as it relates to the day-to-day world of writing, reporting, producing, and presenting news. That is why this book opens with a look at the various ways people think about convergence and how that translates to the daily work of journalism. It sets out to explain that convergence is as much a way of thinking as it is a way of doing.

In fact, convergence in journalism defies a one-size-fits-all set of practices. The way that convergence works in Lawrence, Kansas, may not work in Hartford, Connecticut, because their news communities are not the same. And the way convergence was operating in 1998 is different from how it worked in 2004 or 2005. What is common is the idea that newsrooms should try to work together to do a better job of informing people. That is convergence. It is about acknowledging that the way journalism has always been done needs to evolve, and con­tinue to evolve, because news audiences are evolving. Convergence is not about turning news­paper reporters into television anchors and radio reporters into online graphics designers. It is about getting news people to understand and play to the strengths of each medium—print, online, and broadcast—to better inform a public who already chooses among a variety of media to get the news. It is about flexibility.

This book aims to prepare journalists for an industry that requires flexibility and adapt­ability in addition to the traditional critical thinking, strong writing, and insightful reporting skills. It is about getting tomorrow's journalists thinking in multiple media, since that is how their public already thinks.

This book can serve as a practical guide, a basic primer, to thinking, writing, and reporting stories in print, in broadcast, and on the Web. It is not a print or broadcast text with some convergence mixed in. Nor is it an online text that focuses on technology over content. Instead, it is a journalism text that treats print, online, and broadcast as equal outlets. It aims to bridge the gap between old media and new, between older ways of teaching and doing journalism and newer ways that are being devised and revised.

As such, this book is about a mindset and a skill set that relies on each medium's strengths and common values. Broadcast's strengths are immediacy, simplicity, and visuals. Print's strengths are providing context and exploring complexity. Online's strengths are interactivity, searchability, and multimedia. All of them—print, broadcast, online—strive for accuracy, fair­ness, truth, and impact. Convergence-oriented newsrooms aim to accentuate the strengths and common values in their daily operations. Many of them have been attempting a team approach toward news producing, relying on different people with different skills to create dif­ferent ways of delivering stories to the public.

In visiting nearly a dozen newsrooms in 2003 and 2004, in search of the one answer for implementing convergence, I instead found several answers. Newsrooms as different as the Christian Science Monitor and ESPN were attempting to deliver news in more than one way to reach diffuse news consumers. They were attempting convergence but in ways that fit their newsroom thinking. Time and again, the biggest obstacle to any and all implementation was an attitude that newspaper, radio, television, and online journalists have nothing in common. The medium defined their journalism. Many believed that the values of newspaper journal­ism, broadcast journalism, and online news are far too different for coordination and cooper­ation to work. They believed the cultural divide was too wide to be bridged.

This book aims to begin to bridge that divide. That is why the first three chapters, com­prising part I, examine the mindset of convergence. Before convergence can work in the news­room, journalists in different media have to acknowledge that technology has placed more choice, and thus more power, in the hands of consumers. They have to understand that the economic and social forces in which they operate demand that they change and adapt. And they have to be willing to take control of that change by breaking down the cultural barriers that have made working in multiple media so difficult. Part I of this book looks at how to get one's head around the idea of convergence in journalism.

Chapter 1 explains what convergence is and is not, as it relates to the news industry. It gives an overview of the changing landscape in the news industry, thanks to new technolo­gies, lifestyle habits, and media economics. It explains how the audiences for news have changed and why convergence is being tried in response to that change.

Chapter 2 looks at newsroom cultures, setups, and attitudes which have been hurdles that must be overcome in implementing a more team-oriented, multiple media, and conver­gent news operation. It points out the areas where newspaper, broadcast, and online opera­tions have similar functions, and where they diverge. The chapter then looks at how some news operations have attempted to pool their efforts and overcome conflicting ideas about deadlines, management, work flow, and communication. Chapter 2 examines how different news organizations have adapted their convergence-oriented operations to fit their newsroom culture, staffs, and mission.

Chapter 3 wraps up the first section by addressing how to think about convergence, with a look at the common values and goals of news organizations. It outlines the values that news­papers, television and radio stations, and news websites share: fairness, accuracy, seeking truth, independence, and public service. The chapter explores how convergence-oriented news organizations seek to capitalize on those basic values and goals in striving to overcome the barriers to cooperative news ventures. Chapter 3 also presents the strengths and weaknesses of each news medium and explores how cross-media news-gathering and news presentation plays to the strengths in an effort to minimize the weaknesses. The chapter explores the benefits to the news public as well as news organizations in providing news on various platforms.

While the first section of this book addresses needed changes in organizing and coordinat­ing journalism, the second section focuses on some of the basic skills needed to do daily jour­nalism in a convergent, multiple-media news environment. The skills delineated in each of the four chapters of this section could easily warrant a separate text, and traditionally they have been presented that way. Anyone who has tried to teach convergence (as I have) by drawing on the strengths of each medium for a class in convergence has had to seek information from sep­arate books. This section of the text sets out to put basic skills of news-gathering for broadcast, print, and online together in one place. Again, this serves as a bridge from traditional basic writ­ing and reporting texts often grounded in either print or broadcast. It serves as a starting point in learning and applying basic skills to multiple media. The section looks at the writing, think­ing, organization, and collecting of information required for basic journalism. It discusses tried-and-true reporting and story presentation methods, but from a convergence standpoint.

Chapter 4, "Approaching the Story," begins with the various news-gathering and reporting skills that every journalist needs to develop, regardless of the outlet in which their work ultimately appears. It outlines how to find story ideas, story angles, and story sources. The chapter explores observation, interviewing, and note-taking techniques that remain at the core of all news-gathering. It discusses how knowing the story, the audience, and the medium or media used in telling the story affects the backgrounding, planning, reporting, and execu­tion of the story. Chapter 4 looks at the gathering of information, imagery, and insight needed for good storytelling, regardless of the medium in which it finally appears.

While chapter 4 looks at common news-gathering techniques, the next three chapters explore the writing and presentation strengths of broadcast, print, and online. Each chapter adds to the previous chapters in developing from simple to more complex story reporting and storytelling.

Broadcast writing leads off the medium-specific chapters because it forces the develop­ment of simple writing. Nothing brings home the need for simplicity more than hearing the written word spoken. Broadcast forces writers to hear their words as others, the audience, will hear them. Chapter 5 begins with broadcast writing in addressing the clear and simple pre­sentation of information. It examines basic components of news leads and news stories. The chapter then moves from the simplicity of writing to the complexity of adding sound and visu­als to the storytelling. It explores how to seek out good sound and telling visuals to enhance the storytelling. It introduces the idea of layering elements of news—words, pictures, and sound—as part of the process needed in organizing multiple-media storytelling.

Chapter 6 looks at developing nuance and context in reporting. It also addresses the lay­ering of words, visuals (description), and sound (quotes) via the limitations of presenting the news in print. It expands on the simple writing and reporting outlined in basic broadcast sto­ries. The chapter addresses the stylistic variations required of print, such as placement of attri­bution and the use of quotes and time references. And it explores ways to take the reporting of a story to a more detailed level. Chapter 6 examines some observation and number-crunching skills that can add detail and significance to news stories. It also addresses nuance by dis­cussing the notion of a story's voice and tone in the written word.

The last chapter in part II examines writing, interactivity, and multimedia for news online. Chapter 7 explores the different ways news and information are being presented on the Web. Online news and the technologies available to produce it are changing dramatically and quickly. But some common notions about writing for the Web and ways of developing multi­media and interactivity have been established. Chapter 7 explains the organization of writing for the Web, using chunks, bullets, and blocks to allow browsers to navigate and explore a Web story. It outlines various interactive activities, from discussion boards to games. It also presents various types of multimedia storytelling, using animation, audio, video, and text to give news audiences different experiences in understanding news and information. Chapter 7 looks at the various ways that the Internet and the Web represent convergence in one place: the computer.

The final section of this book takes a look at what might be ahead for convergence in jour­nalism by looking at what is already emerging. Thanks to new technologies, consumers can easily become producers of news, and today's young news consumers are learning multime­dia habits alongside the alphabet and multiplication tables. These changes require journalism to adapt; convergence is one strategy that incorporates change as a way of doing business.

Chapter 8, on participatory journalism, addresses a trend that exploded onto the jour­nalism scene between the time this book was proposed and the time it was put together, less three years. While blogs, webcasts, podcasts, and other forms of individual online writing and information-gathering have not attracted huge audiences (thousands of visitors to indi­vidual sites versus millions to network news for example), they have attracted a following. And that indicates that traditional journalism's audience will continue to be nibbled away by new forms of storytelling. Chapter 8 explores how some news organizations are trying to adjust to this new wave of consumer-producer interaction and how people are creating new forums for news.

The final chapter of the book briefly explores what the next wave of journalists can expect their audience to want by looking at what tomorrow's news audiences are getting today. Operations producing news for kids have been working with convergence—doing news in print, online, and for broadcast—as long as, if not longer, than their adult counterparts. Interactivity, multimedia, and participatory journalism are commonplace for a generation that is giving new meaning to the term "media multitasking." Chapter 9 looks at what may be in store for journalists in the near future to respond to audience needs and wants being devel­oped today.

Throughout this book, I have weaved examples from my own experiences as a consecutive convergent, a journalist who has worked in print and broadcast and has had some expo­sure to online journalism, although not at the same time. I also have included perspectives, examples, and comments from a variety of newsrooms that are attempting to do journalism in more than one medium.

Yet a textbook on convergence in one sense is an oxymoron, as it presents information about journalism in just one form—text. And because of that, it reflects the weakness associated with the print format: It lacks immediacy. News operations and their staffs change from one year to the next; the information in this text represents what was happening with conver­gence in certain newsrooms from 2003 through mid-2005.

A text also lacks interactivity and multimedia. A book on convergence needs to provide information in more than one medium. And since online allows for aural, visual, text, and commentary, a Web log, or blog, accompanies this book. It includes exercises, additional inter­view information, newsroom pictures, links to the news sites and blogs mentioned in the book, and an area for updates on convergence efforts. It aims to play to the strengths of different media as well as to refer users to websites with more detailed expertise. The website explores how convergence is working to respond to the century of change and choice in the world of news today.

 

 

 

A provocative and deeply thoughtful new novel about a life shaped by the worst horrors of the twentieth century and one man’s attempt to reclaim happiness: A Mad Desire to Dance by Elie Wiesel, translated by Catherine Temerson (Knopf)

The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing by Daniel Bergner (Ecco) How do we come to be who we are sexually? How do we cope with the forces of desire? How can we understand the relationship between the transcendent and the physical, between the wish for love and the anarchy of the erotic?

The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel by Salman Rushdie (Random House) (paperback) A tall, yellow-haired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence.

Convergence Journalism: Writing and Reporting across the News Media by Janet Kolodzy (Paperback) (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) Excerpt: Ever since I made the leap from journalism practitioner to journalism teacher in 1998, media prognosticators have been declaring the death of radio, daily newspapers, the network news, journalistic ethics, and even journalism itself. Old media will be replaced by new media. Bloggers will replace journalists. "We media" will replace mainstream media. Yet if anything can be discerned about journalism's future from what has been happening in the first few years of the twenty-first century, it is that this will be a century of change and choice. Journalism of the future will involve all sorts of media: old and new, niche and mass, the personal and the global. It will involve storytelling in every combination of words, pictures, and sound. And it will be propelled not just by journalists but by news audiences. That is already apparent today.

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Religion And The Rise Of Nationalism: A Profile Of An East-Central European City by Robert E. Alvis (Religion and Politics: Syracuse University Press) Explores the interface between Christianity and nascent nationalist movements in East-Central Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century through an in-depth study of Poznan, a city located roughly midway between Berlin and Warsaw.

Currently part of Poland, the city of Poznan straddled an ethnic border zone of sorts prior to World War II, on the edge of a predominantly German sphere of settlement to the west and a predominantly Polish sphere to the east. This juxtaposition of cultures helped stimulate the development of vigorous nationalist movements in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Poznan emerged as an important center of such activity among Germans and Poles alike. Robert E. Alvis tracks the rise of nationalism in Poznan and examines how religious affiliation factored into the process.

Drawing upon a wealth of archival data, including memoirs, police and government correspondence, and parish and archdiocesan records, the author reconstructs evolving patterns of collective identity during a time of rapid socioeconomic change and political, religious, and cultural ferment. He concludes that in Poznan, religion provided critical foundations for the development of Polish and German nationalist movements and enhanced their appeal across a broad demographic spectrum. This book encourages a rethinking of the widely held view that early European nationalism was largely a secular phenomenon at odds with religion.

 Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking) The academic study of religion has blossomed with incredible variegated studies of many sorts in the last couple of decades.  One promising trend that has created perhaps more heat than light on the meaning of religion is the application of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology and neuroscience to the social study of religion.  Dennett's new book is probably the most sustained rationale of bafflement by a secular academic about the anachronism of religion to grace bookshelves in the last decade.  I am always surprised that people who have no religion find it in themselves to convince people with religion that what they believe has no necessity because they find the necessity in it.  One very common mistake made by most Western views of contemporary religion is the assumption that religion is a matter of belief.  As such it is felt that it is a choice, more than a reaching toward the ineffable mystery of being.

Because social trends have shown that adherence to religion is a growing phenomenon in the world today and that the secular hopes, so closely related to our views of modernism that religion should fade away with misguided views of supernaturalism and superstition as people became more dependent upon the benefits of science and technology.  In paradoxical fashion the more conservative religions tend to be first adapters of new technologies in promulgating their religious supernaturalist and literalist of use of revelation of whatever Scripture to which they adhere.

For a growing number of people, there is nothing more important than religion. It is an integral part of their marriage, child rearing, and community. In this daring new book, distinguished philosopher Daniel C. Dennett takes a hard look at this phenomenon and asks why. Where does our devotion to God come from and what purpose does it serve? Is religion a blind evolutionary compulsion or a rational choice? In Breaking the Spell, Dennett argues that the time has come to shed the light of science on the fundamental questions of faith.

In a spirited narrative that ranges widely through history, philosophy, and psychology, Dennett explores how organized religion evolved from folk beliefs and why it is such a potent force today. Deftly and lucidly, he contends that the "belief in belief" has fogged any attempt to rationally consider the existence of God and the relationship between divinity and human need.

Breaking the Spell is not an antireligious screed but rather an eye-opening exploration of the role that belief plays in our lives, our interactions, and our country. With the gulf between rationalists and adherents of "intelligent design" widening daily, Dennett has written a timely and provocative book that will be read and passionately debated by believers and nonbelievers alike. 

Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion by Todd Tremlin (Oxford University Press) Around the world and throughout history, in cultures as diverse as ancient Mesopotamia and modern America, human beings have been compelled by belief in gods and developed complex religions around them. But why? What makes belief in supernatural beings so widespread? And why are the gods of so many different people so similar in nature? This provocative book explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas by looking through the lens of science at the common structures and functions of human thought.

The first general introduction to the "cognitive science of religion," Minds and Gods presents the major themes, theories, and thinkers involved in this revolutionary new approach to human religiosity. Arguing that we cannot understand what we think until we first understand how we think, the book sets out to study the evolutionary forces that modeled the modern human mind and continue to shape our ideas and actions today. Todd Tremlin details many of the adapted features of the brain -- illustrating their operation with examples of everyday human behavior -- and shows how mental endowments inherited from our ancestral past lead many people to naturally entertain religious ideas. In short, belief in gods and the social formation of religion have their genesis in biology, in powerful cognitive processes that all humans share.

In the course of illuminating the nature of religion, this book also sheds light on human nature: why we think we do the things we do and how the reasons for these things are so often hidden from view. This discussion ranges broadly across recent scientific findings in areas such as paleoanthropology, primate studies, evolutionary psychology, early brain development, and cultural transmission. While these subjects are complex, the story is told here in a conversational style that is engaging, jargon free, and accessible to all readers. With Minds and Gods, Tremlin offers a roadmap to a fascinating and growing field of study, one that is sure to generate interest and debate and provide readers with a better understanding of themselves and their beliefs.