By the way

Adults don't often have a chance to be read to. Children — with luck — may curl up in an arm chair on a rainy day and listen to a soft voice talking like the rain. Isak Dinesen recorded that phrase for talking in rhythm and in rhyme, from a muddy evening game at the end of a hayfield. The rain, she said, was welcomed and soothing, where she lived in Africa, and so was swinging, striding language. Reading aloud is a pleasure; so is listening.

Before the cold weather breaks, warm reading evenings are springing up. Robert Campanile and Milne Library will present Caligula by Albert Camus at the Williams Inn, this Friday at 7 p.m. Caligula, the lunatic Roman emperor who made his horse a magistrate, makes a grim central character — Camus wrote the play in 1938 and saw it performed at the end of World War II, in a time full of political fanatics. But he concludes that a man cannot cut himself off from humanity without going mad.

For a funnier evening, Matt Tannenbaum at the Bookstore will read humorous stories from Dorothy Parker and others, March 19 at Colorful Stitches in Lenox, at 7:30 p.m. Listeners and knitters are welcome. An evening with the wit and critic who wrote

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania

will surely be a lively one.

Posted by Katherine Abbott at 9:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What you want in an international journalist — you want a guy who sees a new place from the ground. He gets through floods in a wooden boat and on the back of a motorcycle, and he tells you about water washing up to the roof tiles and the steam over the rice patties. He walks into government offices and village meetings about tree plantings, and when stretchers pass by he asks who was hurt and why. You want a man who sees people.

Robert D. Kaplan does that. And he knows what he's looking at. He has been reporting on difficult, dangerous and developing places for more than twenty years. He began as a freelancer, covering the Iraq war in the 1980's, and since then he has written for The New York Times, , and others, published seven books, and influenced two U.S. presidents. And he will be speaking at the Stockbridge Library this Sunday at 4 p.m..

He will talk about his latest book: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground, published in September 2007 by Random House. He has spent months travelling with small U.S. military units in farflung places, and here he gives an inside view of the navy and the marines and their varied assignments abroad.

Kaplan asks hard questions about the way countries develop — and the way they hold onto moderation and dignity, or lose it. In Waterworld he writes about Bangaladesh:"squeezed into an Iowa-sized territory—20 to 60 percent of which floods every year—is a population half the size of that in the United States and larger than the one in Russia."

Like many developing countries, he argues, Bangaladesh is torn between the competing pressures of its own non-government organizations, reclaiming land tree by tree, and foreign aid, and fundamentalist extremists. His articles have raised hot debate. Agree or disagree, but one impression remains clear: that he speaks with respect of the people who live there, in the monsoon rains, and know what it feels like.

Posted by Katherine Abbott at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)