Episode 3: War & Place
Reporter Deborah George takes us to post-war Sierra Leone to meet a young woman who will become her daughter. She ran for her life from the children’s army. Now she runs high school track in America.
Our roundtable of writers on Queen Mary 2 debates whether the war memorials and museums we visit are cautionary or make us complacent by neatly packaging war and genocide into the past. Around the table are novelist Robert Stone, historian Omer Bartov, Phillip Gourevitch, who wrote "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” and former Marine Wayne Karlin, author of "War Movies: Journeys to Vietnam.”
Joining the roundtable, film critic John Anderson says war movies about the aftermath, like The Best Years of Our Lives are better than battle movies. And he triggers a discussion of how the public wants fact, not more fiction, about Iraq.
Famed war photographer Steve McCurry tells how, years later, he again found the famous hazel-eyed refugee, the "Afghan Girl" and how her photo, published literally a million times, has helped her family. And Poet Frances Richey tries to find the breath to read out loud the powerful poems of prayer she penned when her son was fighting in Iraq. He is home safe. She reads. But the poems take her back.
Host on Episode 3 | |
 | Paul Holdengräber is the cultural wunderkind whose noted claim to fame as the Director of Public Programs at the prestigious New York Public Library is making the library an after-dark hot spot for many New Yorkers. Previously, Holdengräber was the founder and director of the Institute for Art and Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. |
Guests on Episode 3 | |
 | Tom Brokaw is a distinguished television journalist and best-selling author. He was previously the managing editor and anchorman for American’s most-watched cable or broadcast news program, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. His books include The Greatest Generation, stories of men and women who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. |
 | Maxine Hong Kingston is an author and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. The first American-born child of Chinese immigrants, Kingston’s works often reflect on her cultural heritage and blend fiction with non-fiction. They include The Woman Warrior, awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and China Men, which was awarded the 1981 National Book Award. In 1997, President Bill Clinton presented Hong Kingston with the National Humanities Medal. |
 | Steve McCurry is a photojournalist best known for his photograph, "Afghan Girl," that originally appeared in National Geographic magazine. Today, it is named as "the most recognized photograph" in the history of the magazine. He is the recipient of numerous photography awards including the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad, and the National Press Photographer’s Association award for Magazine Photographer of the Year. |
 | Frances Richey is an award-winning poet whose first collection, The Burning Point, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poems from her new collection, The Warrior, have appeared in a two page spread in O, The Oprah Magazine, Nicholas Kristof's New York Times column, on the “Lives” page of The New York Times Magazine, and the local PBS show “New York Voices.” |
 | Philip Gourevitch is the editor of The Paris Review. Gourevitch has written on a variety of subjects -- from ethnic conflicts in Africa, Europe, and Asia to political corruption in Rhode Island and the music of James Brown. He became widely known for his first book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. This book won numerous awards, including the 1998 National Book Critics Circle award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 1999 Guardian First Book Award. His latest book is Standard Operating Procedure, which he co-wrote with Erroll Morris, about the abuse of prisoners by US soldiers at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. |
 | Robert Stone is among the most critically-acclaimed living American novelists. His novels include the National Book Award-winning Dog Soldiers, and the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning A Flag for Sunrise. In 2007, Stone published a memoir entitled Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, which discusses his experiences in the Sixties "counterculture" beginning with his days in the Navy and ending with his days as a correspondent in Vietnam. Prime Green is already regarded as a masterpiece among many literary groups. |
 | Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on genocide and one of the foremost scholars of Jewish life in Galicia. He is the author of seven books including the acclaimed Hitler's Army. Bartov was born in Israel and attended Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford. |
 | Wayne Karlin is an author and decorated Marine whose books include War Movies: Journeys to Vietnam, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners, Crossover, Lost Armies, The Extras, and Us. Karlin has been called by Tim O'Brien "one of the most gifted writers to emerge from the Vietnam War.” Karlin co-edited the first anthology of Vietnam War veteran fiction, Free Fire Zone, and in 1995, he co-edited The Other Side of Heaven: Post War Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers. Karlin's novel, Prisoners, received the Paterson Prize for Fiction. Karlin currently teaches at the College of Southern Maryland. |
 | John Anderson is a film critic, journalist and author whose film critiques appear regularly in Newsday, Variety, Screen International, and The New York Times. Anderson has also contributed to the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, The Nation, Artforum, Interview, Out, and The Washington Post. Anderson is a past member of the selection committee of the New York Film Festival and is a two-time past chair of the New York Film Critics Circle. Anderson is currently a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and the National Book Critics Circle. |
 | Deborah George is an independent radio producer, editor and reporter. Her career has taken her to Asia, Africa and South America. She has covered the Rwandan genocide, the war in Sierra Leone, the politics of biotechnology and the AIDS epidemic. She has received numerous awards, including the DuPont Columbia Gold and Silver Batons, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, the Casey Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Award for best national news documentary from the Radio-Television News Directors Association. |
Production of Liner Notes is made possible through the generous support of Cunard.
