Indiana University Press blog

An Author Meets His Subject

Guest post by Jeffrey B. Lilley, author of Have the Mountains Fallen?.

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In September 2007, I met Chingiz Aitmatov, a man whose life and work I would spend the next 10 years studying and writing about. I couldn’t have expected then how much of my life he would become, so much that I resigned my job and worked 18 months without income to finish Have the Mountains Fallen?, a joint biography of Aitmatov and Kyrgyz journalist and exile Azamat Altay that was eventually published in early 2018 by Indiana University Press.

Aitmatov is one of the most famous writers Americans don’t know about—except perhaps those Americans who were reading IU Press’s publications in the 1980s, when they may have encountered a translation of Aitmatov’s most famous book, The Day Lasts Longer than a Century. In that book, Aitmatov, whose works were translated into 160 languages, popularized the term mankurt for a person who forgets where he is from, is ignorant of history and therefore becomes a tool in the hands of others—basically a slave.

Part Kyrgyz and part Tatar, born and raised in Soviet Kyrgyzia, a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, Aitmatov was keenly aware of where he was from. His life was a constant struggle to not become a tool of anyone or anything.

When I met the 79-year old Aitmatov in independent Kyrgyzstan in 2007, he was staying in a cottage at the government dacha compound on Lake Issyk Kul, a collection of Soviet-era rest houses connected by cement pathways and shaded by pine and birch trees. Though a bit worse for wear after years of use by Kyrgyzstan’s officialdom, the Soviet-era compound on the north shore of the lake was still a quiet hideaway. 

Across the way stood the cottage where Aitmatov had written The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. Down a pathway, the gentle roll of waves lapped against the shore, and the Tian Shan Mountains rose in the background. In his younger days, Aitmatov used to take nightly swims in the lake. His strokes would take him offshore into the black of night, out of sight of nervous family members who waited in silence on the shore. The swims afforded him time alone in his hectic life—a separate peace of sorts—and he would return full of energy and refreshed. But in the new millennium, those swims had become a thing of the past for the 78-year old Aitmatov.

On the phone earlier that week, Aitmatov had been welcoming, inviting me to spend time with him at the dacha compound, and he was solicitous in person, asking about my visit to his home village. “You are the first American journalist to visit Sheker, he remarked shortly after we shook hands. “Did they receive you well?” Then he settled into a chair. Despite this warm welcome, he seemed exhausted, and his heavily lidded eyes opened and shut during our hour-long talk. Suitcases were open around the cottage, indicating a temporary stay. A bottle of Lipitor nearby was a reminder of the writer’s health concerns, and during our conversation, he nodded off several times. The interview became more of a lopsided exchange between generations: the aging writer sharing his thoughts with a curious American shaped by the Cold War.

Aitmatov spoke of writing being his spiritual life, and of religious extremism gripping the world. Three years on, he was still troubled by the tragedy at Beslan in southern Russia in 2004 when Chechen terrorists seized an elementary school and took hundreds of young children hostage. Many inside the red-brick school building died during the ensuing shootout between the Chechens and Russian law enforcement. Pictures of bloody, half-clothed children being rescued from their smoldering school shocked the world in a way that has become too familiar of late.

In a deep, slow voice, Aitmatov spoke of his role in pushing forward perestroika in the Soviet Union as a top advisor to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. “I consider that fate put me in this position,” he said, by way of explanation. “I did as I could to answer to the contemporary challenges. I understood that the issue was how to get out of totalitarianism to democracy. And that’s a long process. We need another hundred years to travel this path, to comprehend. In this is the essence of human life and all history: there’s nothing simple to understand.”

Learn more about Jeffrey B. Lilley's latest book:

  

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About the Author

After witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, Jeffrey B. Lilley moved to Central Asia in 2004. During a three-year posting in Kyrgyzstan, he read the works of Chinghiz Aitmatov, slept in yurts, drank fermented mare’s milk, and hiked in the country’s beautiful mountains. Over the next ten years, he worked in the field of democracy and governance support in Washington, DC, and the Middle East, returning to Kyrgyzstan in 2016 to lead a British-funded parliamentary support program. Lilley is an author (with James R. Lilley) of China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage and Diplomacy and Have the Mountains Fallen? Two Journeys of Loss and Redemption in the Cold War.

 

Now Available! Get your copy of Jeffrey B. Lilley's latest book, Have the Mountains Fallen?

IU Press Author Pravina Shukla Wins Teaching Award

Indiana University Press author Pravina Shukla has been recognized by Indiana University for her excellent work in the classroom. Shukla will be recognized with the 2018 President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

An accomplished scholar, Shukla has previously been honored with the Indiana University Trustee Teaching Awards in 2002, 2007, 2010, and 2016.

Shukla has been involved in the production of several books published by IU Press, working as both an author and editor on four total volumes.

Please join us in celebrating this exciting news! More information on Dr. Shukla's books is available below.

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Sacred Art

Catholic Saints and Candomble Gods in Modern Brazil

Sacred art flourishes today in northeastern Brazil, where European and African religious traditions have intersected for centuries. Professional artists create images of both the Catholic saints and the African gods of Candomblé to meet the needs of a vast market of believers and art collectors.

Over the past decade, Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla conducted intense research in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, interviewing the artists at length, photographing their processes and products, attending Catholic and Candomblé services, and finally creating a comprehensive book, governed by a deep understanding of the artists themselves.

Beginning with Edival Rosas, who carves monumental baroque statues for churches, and ending with Francisco Santos, who paints images of the gods for Candomblé terreiros, the book displays the diversity of Brazilian artistic techniques and religious interpretations. Glassie and Shukla enhance their findings with comparisons from art and religion in the United States, Nigeria, Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, and Japan and gesture toward an encompassing theology of power and beauty that brings unity into the spiritual art of the world.

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The Grace of Four Moons

Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India

Because clothing, food, and shelter are basic human needs, they provide excellent entries to cultural values and individual aesthetics. Everyone gets dressed every day, but body art has not received the attention it deserves as the most common and universal of material expressions of culture. The Grace of Four Moons aims to document the clothing decisions made by ordinary people in their everyday lives. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily in the city of Banaras, India, Pravina Shukla conceptualizes and realizes a total model for the study of body art—understood as all aesthetic modifications and supplementations to the body. Shukla urges the study of the entire process of body art, from the assembly of raw materials and the manufacture of objects, through their sale and the interactions between merchants and consumers, to the consumer's use of objects in creating personal decoration. 

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Costume

Performing Identities through Dress

What does it mean to people around the world to put on costumes to celebrate their heritage, reenact historic events, assume a role on stage, or participate in Halloween or Carnival? Self-consciously set apart from everyday dress, costume marks the divide between ordinary and extraordinary settings and enables the wearer to project a different self or special identity. Pravina Shukla offers richly detailed case studies from the United States, Brazil, and Sweden to show how individuals use costumes for social communication and to express facets of their personalities.

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The Individual and Tradition

Folkloristic Perspectives

Profiles of artists and performers from around the world form the basis of this innovative volume that explores the many ways individuals engage with, carry on, revive, and create tradition. Leading scholars in folklore studies consider how the field has addressed the connections between performer and tradition and examine theoretical issues involved in fieldwork and the analysis and dissemination of scholarship in the context of relationships with the performers. Honoring Henry Glassie and his remarkable contributions to the field of folklore, these vivid case studies exemplify the best of performer-centered ethnography.

 

 

IU Press Co-Editor to Speak on IU Bloomington Campus

Dr. Stephanie Shonekan, co-editor of Black Lives Matter and Music, a forthcoming book from Indiana University Press, is slated to speak on the Indiana University Bloomington campus on Thursday, November 2.

Dr. Stephanie Shonekan is Chair of the Department of Black Studies and Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Black Studies at the University of Missouri. She will present her paper, titled "American Anthem: An Examination of the Significance of the National Anthem for African American Identity and Nationhood" from 3:30 to 5:00 pm in the Hoagy Carmichael Room of Morrison Hall.

Dr. Shonekan's forthcoming book from Indiana University Press, titled Black Lives Matter and Music, will be available fall 2018 will be the first book in the new IU Press series Activist Encounters in Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Based off panels presented at the American Folklore Society Annual Meetings, Black Lives Matter and Music is an accessibly written tool for scholars and students in higher education that uses case studies to help readers understand various aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement. Each chapter of the book focuses on a particular case study related to music and the Black Lives Matter movement with the goal of inspiring and facilitating productive dialogues among scholars, students, and the communities they study.

 

Meet the translator of 'After the Roundup'

Richard Kutner, the translator of After the Roundup: Escape and Survival in Hitler's France, will be making several appearances in New York to promote the book.

After the Roundup tells the story of author Joseph Weismann's experiences as a young boy in World War II-era France. Set to be taken to Auschwitz with the rest of his family, Weismann, who was just eleven years old at the time, escaped the Nazi guards with a friend. Weismann shares his incredible story in After the Roundup, now available in English for the first time thanks to the work of Richard Kutner.

Below are the details for interested readers who may be able to attend.

Sunday, May 21st, 2:00 P.M. - Museum of Jewish Heritage

• 36 Battery Place, New York, NY 10280
• Free for members, $15 for non-members

Monday, May 22nd, 7:00 PM - Albertine, the bookstore of the French Government Cultural Services

• 972 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10075
• Free event, but attendees must RSVP for the event on the bookstore's website
• Holocaust historians Susan Zuccotti and Deborak Dwork will participate in this event

Thursday, May 25th, 7:00 P.M. - Shakespeare and Co.

• 939 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10065
• RSVP in advance to events@shakeandco.com

'Earth Eats' author to speak at Wylie House

Annie Corrigan, the author of new IU Press book Earth Eats: Real Food, Green Living, plans to speak at the Wylie House Museum's Education Center on May 11 at 7:00 pm.

Corrigan hosts the WFIU show Earth Eats with co-author Daniel Orr. The book, released in March by IU Press, features recipes from the radio show as well as tips, tricks, and advice about planting and growing your own food as well as eating local.

The Wylie House event will be open to the public and copies of Earth Eats: Real Food, Green Living will be available for purchase.

View the trailer for the book below. 

IU Press author to hold reading in Bloomington

Indiana University Press author Andrea Lewis will hold a reading of her new book What My Last Man Did at The Bishop Bar in Bloomington, Indiana this Saturday, March 25. The book is a recent winner of the Blue Lights Book Prize.

The reading is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m., with a Q&A session to follow. Copies of What My Last Man Did will be available for purchase. Attendees must be at least 18 of age to be allowed into The Bishop Bar.

What My Last Man Did follows generations of one family across nearly a century through ten short stories, each one evoking an intense sense of place and time, from New Orleans in 1895 to Grand Isle, Louisiana, during the hurricane of 1901 and on to London during the Olympic Games of 1948. The people in these ten vivid tales face tragedy and real-world catastrophic events—war, hurricanes, the Great Depression, racial tension—in their pursuit of love, family, and belonging.

 

'Folklore' author leads discussion at IU Bloomington

IU Press author Dr. Bill Ivey recently led a brownbag discussion on campus at Indiana University Bloomginton.

The Folklore and Ethnomusicology Department's Visiting Research Scholar and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Ivey's book, Folklore, is due to be released by IU Press later this year.

In Folklore, Ivey argues that the world today is being reshaped by the end of the Enlightenment. In the 18th and 19th century, imperialism and colonialism spread Enlightenment values around the world. Through the 20th century, civilization believed this universal commitment to human rights would be permanent.

Today that assumption is under threat. Contemporary public intellectuals have entirely missed this truth, leading them to offer incomplete or unhelpful analyses of the current global situation, and inadequate prescriptions for a way forward. 

In this brownbag, Ivey addresses those claims and his book as a whole. Watch it below:

'Hopeless But Optimistic' garnering significant media attention

Douglas Wissing's in-depth reporting on the ongoing war in Afghanistan is drawing some wide-ranging attention from media outlets throughout the country. Here's a quick round up of the recent notable appearances.

Wissing appeared Thursday on the Reuters War College podcast, speaking about the chances of the war ending and how the United States got into this situation in the first place.

The Week also profiled Wissing as a part of its coverage of the war. In that interview, Wissing said an intelligence officer told him privately that the powers that be consider Afghanistan to be "the perfect war." Perfect, that is, for making money.

One really smart intelligence officer one day in Laghman Province, he was on an embattled forward operating base and he clearly had been up all night. We were standing outside and he started telling me that he had been a narcotics detective in Las Vegas. "You know, this war is just like the Mafia. It's just like Las Vegas, you know. Everybody gets their cut," he said. "It's the perfect war. Everybody makes money."

I took that and started talking to more officers and began to learn about things like how our money helps finance the Taliban. I started doing hundreds of interviews with everybody from security soldiers who had been on the ground to generals and ambassadors and congresspeople, and I began to understand that there was this toxic network that connected ambitious American careerists who profit on military development and industrial development corporations, corrupt Afghan insiders, and the Taliban. It was as the soldier said: It was the perfect war. Everybody was making money. Everybody was benefiting — everyone, of course, but the American taxpayers and the Afghan people.

Finally, Wissing made a local appearance on the WFHB program Big Talk! w/ Michael Glab this week. That interview is available for your listening pleasure here.

IU Press author lecture: The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

IU Press author Mel Scult recently lectured at a Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia, giving a speech entitled "The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan," based on Scult's book of the same name.

Courtesy of videographer Barry Dornfeld, Scult's lecture appears below. 

The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan, by Mel Scult from Barry Dornfeld on Vimeo.

Alona Frankel at the Library of Congress

IU Press author Alona Frankel recently made an appearance at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., reading to children and speaking about her new book, Girl.

The official photographer of the Library of Congress was kind enough to share these photos with us. Take a look!

Frankel's most recent book, Girl, tells the story of her experiences as a Holocaust survivor. It is available now from IU Press. Learn more about the book in the video below: