“They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.”

When Suki Kim’s wrote about the six months she was as a teacher in North Korea, she was haunted by the idea that her book might lead to the punishment or even the death of her former students, who could be punished for knowing too much about the world. For … Read More

“We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.”

LevineWhat is work? This is the question that poet Philip Levine, who died last Saturday, asked many times. He started working in a Detroit factory at age 14. He believed that his work as a poet was “to name and recover,” and to stand up for the “victimized, the … Read More

“They’d be sat there eating on the stairs and as they got older, they’d go higher up the stairs.”

wilsonThis oral history collection by the York Archaeological Trust gives us a startling glimpse of life in a poor part of a city in northern England during the first third of the twentieth century. Our quotation above describes what it was like to have meals in homes with large families … Read More

“Memory resides in specific details, not in abstract notions like ‘beautiful’ or ‘angry.'”

BarringtonWho better to write a book about writing memoirs than Judith Barrington? She can speak from experience as an author and teacher. In this book, which is widely used in college courses and has sold more than 100,000 copies, she speaks to those who “aspire to the highest literary … Read More