Washington post geraldine brooks

From the publishers. While retaining her Australian passport, she became an United States citizen in Early life A native of Sydney, Geraldine Brooks grew up in its inner-west suburb of Ashfield, where she attended Bethlehem College, a secondary school for girls, and the University of Sydney.

The following year, she married American journalist Tony Horwitz in the Southern France village of Tourrettes-sur-Loup and converted to his religion, Judaism. Brooks's first book, Nine Parts of Desire , based on her experiences among Muslim women in the Middle East, was an international bestseller, translated into 17 languages.

Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over , which won the Nita Kibble Literary Award for women's writing, was a memoir and travel adventure about a childhood enriched by penpals from around the world, and her adult quest to find them.

Her first novel, Year of Wonders , published in , became an international bestseller. Set in , the story depicts a young woman's battle to save fellow villagers as well as her own soul when the bubonic plague suddenly strikes her small Derbyshire village of Eyam. Her next novel, March , was inspired by her fondness for Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, which her mother had given her.

To connect that memorable reading experience to her new status in as an American citizen, she researched the Civil War historical setting of Little Women and decided to create a chronicle of wartime service for the "absent father" of the March girls. Some aspects of this chronicle were informed by the life and philosophical writings of the Alcott family patriarch, Amos Bronson Alcott, whom she profiled under the title "Orpheus at the Plow", in the 10 January issue of The New Yorker , a month before March was published.

The parallel novel was generally well received by the critics. It was selected in December selection by the Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published that year. In April , it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In her next novel, People of the Book , Brooks explored a fictionalized history of the Sarajevo Haggadah. This novel was inspired by her reporting for The New Yorker of human interest stories emerging in the aftermath of the —95 breakup of Yugoslavia.

We are a species that cannot quench our violent impulses. The Bible is full of stories about a cruel, vindictive, and violent God. If our God is selfish, war-mongering, and jealous, what really can we expect of ourselves? The scripture says we are made in God's image.

But some philosophers argue that we've created our gods in our own, because the limits of our imagination can do no other but mirror the nature we know. And yet creation, this cosmos, is a place of wonder and transcendent beauty. Click here for details. I wanted a narrator who was part of the ordinary life of the village, but also had access to the gentry, the decision-makers.

Since I knew that the real rector had a maid who survived the plague, she seemed the obvious choice. Anna's character and the changes it undergoes were suggested to me by the lives of women I had met during my years as a reporter in the Middle East and Africa — women who had lived lives that were highly circumscribed and restricted, until thrown into sudden turmoil by a crisis such as war or famine.

These women would suddenly find themselves having to step out of their old roles and assume vastly challenging responsibilities. I saw women who had traveled enormous personal distances — traditional village women in Eritrea who became platoon leaders in the country's independence war; Kurdish women who led their families to safety over mined mountain passes after the failure of their uprising against Saddam Hussein.

If those women could change and grow so remarkably, I reasoned that Anna could, too. And remember that the Restoration was a very fluid time. All the ancient certainties — the monarchy, the Church — had been challenged within these people's lifetime. They had lived through regicide, revolution, civil war. Change was their norm. In the s, women were appearing on the stage for the first time, were assuming influential roles in the Restoration court. Also, life in the villages was much less rigid and restrictive than we often imagine.

I read a lot of sermons while researching the novel, and it struck me that the amount of hectoring from the pulpit on the proper behavior of women probably reflected a widely held view that a lot of "improper" behavior was going on.

In light of your research, can you put into perspective just how extraordinary the villagers' decision to quarantine themselves was? What was happening in London, for example, at the same time? The unique thing about Eyam's quarantine was that it was voluntary. I was able to find no other examples of such communal self-sacrifice.

In London, Samuel Pepys writes in his journal of the terrible treatment meted out to plague victims: "We are become as cruel as dogs one to another.

Pepys writes that you could hear the cries of the afflicted coming from the houses, which were marked with large red crosses and the words "God Have Mercy. In a piece published in The Washington Post after the September 11, , attacks, you wrote: "Whether we also shall one day look back upon this year of flames, germs and war as a 'year of wonders' will depend, perhaps, on how many are able — like the passengers on United Flight 93 or the firefighters of New York City — to match the courageous self-sacrifice of the people of Eyam.

Eyam is a story of ordinary people willing to make an extraordinary sacrifice on behalf of others. September 11, , revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage. Sadly, it also revealed a blind thirst for revenge that led to the murders of a Muslim, a Sikh, and an Egyptian Copt. I have imagined this same instinct to turn on and blame "the other" in the lynching of the Gowdies.

Love, hate, fear. The desire to live and to see your children live. Are these things different on a beautiful autumn morning in a twenty-first-century city than they were in an isolated seventeenth-century village?

The ark comes to Gihon, and David responds with such joy and reverence — all aquiver with tireless dancing — that Natan finds it a little unseemly.

I think I address that in the passage itself. Natan's awkwardness gives way to his own connection with something sublime. Here we are 3, years later, and it would still be new. How is it that a so-called enlightened creature has not seen and sustained this moment? When you have an answer to that question, you will also have the Nobel Peace Prize. We are a species that cannot quench our violent impulses.