Author Spotlight: J. Malcolm Garcia

In What Wars Leave Behind, journalist J. Malcolm Garcia reveals the stories of the people left behind in the war-ravaged countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Kosovo, Chad, and Syria. Garcia gives readers the sort of gritty detail learned from immersing himself in other cultures. He eats the food, drinks the tea, and endures the oppressive heat. These are the stories of how a middle-class guy from the Midwest with a social work degree learned to experience and embrace the cultures of Third World countries in conflict—and lived to tell the tale.

Q: You wrote that you were “more than a little worried” when you gave up your 14-year career in social work to become a reporter. What was the turning point that pushed you into journalism?

I worked at a social services agency for about 10 years. But then it lost its funding. By then I had been doing social work for about 14 years and was ready for a change. We had published a monthly newsletter that was more newspaper than newsletter in that we reported what was going on in the neighborhood. I loved it. When the agency closed, I decided to pursue journalism. 

Q: War zones are obviously not the safest areas, to say the least. What were the most memorable times in your travels when you felt concerned for your well-being?

During my first embed in Afghanistan I remember sitting on the plane, a C-130, and the soldiers all started saying goodbye to one another and me because they thought they could very well be killed by Taliban fighters. Needless to say we weren’t, but it was an odd feeling. Afghanistan, after the heady days of the first few years when Afghans loved us, always had a current of threat. You knew if you wandered by yourself you could be kidnapped. Westerners had prices on their head, $25,000 if I remember correctly. Their translators too. So on the one hand no one was shooting at us in Kabul, yet there was this invisible undercurrent of a threat, of a guy just walking up to you and shooting you or a car screeching to a stop and throwing you in.  

One time in Pakistan, I was in an area of Peshawar that was controlled by the Taliban. The driver took a wrong turn. I was dressed as a native. We were pulled aside by bearded men in black turbans, the kind the Taliban wear. Whether they were Taliban or not, I don’t know. I kept my mouth shut. The driver said I was sick and could not talk. But I was watched closely. The driver said we were visiting family and they let us leave. “You passed” he said, meaning I looked enough like a native. I must have.

Q: You describe journalism as helping to “keep the world real” for you. What is the harshest reality check you’ve come across in your reporting?

The hunger and general deprivation of people in all the countries I’ve visited, and then coming back to the US and confronting malls and coffee shops and the pounds of discarded food that fast food joints and restaurants throw away. The other reality check is that our inner cities are little different than the impoverished neighborhoods in Third World countries. And I sometimes feel comforted in a ghetto because the waste of the affluent neighborhoods I find so jarring.

Q: Your book does a great job of spotlighting the issues that wars leave behind. What programs have you found to be particularly effective in helping resolve these issues?

Support groups where people can talk about the trauma in their lives so they know they are not alone. These people don’t have post traumatic stress, they have ongoing traumatic stress. They feel shamed and weak. Talking makes them feel not so alone.

Q: What kind of impact do you hope this book has on your readers?

That it allows them to envision a world they may not have considered. That they see people are really all the same. They want security and safety for their families. The people affected by wars, including the soldiers, are too often collateral damage to the mindlessness of their leaders.

Q: Are you working on any new projects?

A story about deported American veterans—they were not citizens when they joined the army. They served honorably and, after their discharge, were deported. 

Author Spotlight: Stephen W. Hines

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks edited by Stephen W. Hines

Before Laura Ingalls Wilder found fame with her Little House books, she made a name for herself with short nonfiction pieces in magazines and newspapers. Read today, these pieces offer insight into her development as a writer and depict farm life in the Ozarks—and also show us a different Laura Ingalls Wilder from the woman we have come to know.

Q: Laura Ingalls Wilder is the sort of writer who captures your heart. Her writing was tempered with wisdom and kindness. The Little House books are still read again and again by children all over the world; she’s inspired so many people. What will readers who remember her fondly from The Little House days learn about her from the newspaper columns you have collected in this book?

In Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist, Mrs. Widler's fans will encounter the adult Laura, and they will hear her as a slightly different voice. Here is a woman deeply involved in the day-to-day work of helping to run an Ozark farm, but she is also a woman interested in the world, politics, and the social issues of her day.

Q: Laura Ingalls Wilder may not have identified herself as a feminist, but she undoubtedly influenced countless people who would. Do her Missouri Ruralist columns offer any further insight into her views on equality?

Certainly, she believed in a kind of equality, but that equality probably did not extend as far as it would in some quarters today. I doubt that Mrs. Wilder would have entertained the idea of a house husband, yet she certainly wanted to vote and hated the idea that when improvement organizations were formed, they were often constructed so as to have a "woman's auxiliary," which did a lot of work for which it did not get credit. She didn't want to be an auxiliary anything. She enjoyed political discussion. She was well-read and made so by her daughter Rose.

Q: How did compiling these essays expand your view of Wilder as a pioneer and a writer?

The essays gave me a more complete "biography" of Laura. I learned about a whole part of her life with which I was unfamiliar. The children's stories were great, but Mrs. Wilder continued to have a fascinating life after she left the Dakota prairie. The mature woman was a joiner, an organizer, a doer, a force in her community. No wonder she writes so much about simply coping with being busy!

Q: Wilder is known to have had a strained relationship with her daughter. Does she write about her role as a mother?

There is a fair amount of material concerning her and Rose, but very little that is negative. They didn't wash their underwear in public in those days. Laura was proud of Rose's accomplishments as a writer. And Rose had a penchant for wanting to look after her mother. They spent a good deal of time trying to mother each other

Q: Laura Ingalls Wilder is renowned for having been a hard worker, and she also had a great sense of humor. What is something fun that readers can learn about her from this book?

She fed turtles that came to her back door and tied notes to the dog's collar to tell Almanzo when it was time for lunch. She liked to tell jokes on herself.

Q: What is next for you? Do you have any upcoming books or projects we can anticipate?

Well, my book on the Titanic, Titanic: One Newspaper, Seven Days, and the Truth That Shocked the World, is readily available at the Titanic museum in Branson and at other Titanic locations, and I am busily at work on another title called Treasures in Heaven.

Author Spotlight: Anthony Collings

Capturing the News: Three Decades of Reporting Crisis and Conflict by Anthony Collings
 

Name a hot spot, and Collings has likely been there. From AP correspondent to Newsweek bureau chief to CNN reporter, he covered the Middle East, Rome, Moscow, London, Paris, and Washington. Now he has gathered stories about his work in a book that is both a journalist's memoir and a commentary on the current ethical crises in the news media and how to address them. Collings reveals the dangers and pressures of covering the news and the difficulties of overcoming obstacles to the truth.

Q: What was your most dangerous story?

            Covering fighting in Beirut in the early 1980s. I was captured and held for several hours by unidentified gunmen and Syrian forces during a 1981 missile crisis in Lebanon. Also I was in buildings or vehicles that came under shell fire several times in 1981 and 1982. I was in a hotel in East Beirut that was hit by a bomb.

Q: What was your favorite story as a journalist?

            My most satisfying story was a Newsweek piece about a divided Czech family. The parents had fled to West Germany during the Cold War but their children were not permitted to leave by the Communist Czech government. After my story, and those of other journalists, the Czech government relented and let the children rejoin their parents. I will never forget seeing one of the little girls hugging her mother, who was blind, when the children arrived at the train station in Germany.

Q: What is the main theme of your book?

            It is a combined personal memoir and critique of journalism that gives my thoughts about the profession. Its main theme is that journalism, for all its faults, is an honorable profession that serves the public interest, and is all the more needed in these times of change and challenge.

Q: What is your main critique of journalism today?

            Too much opinion. I am a believer in the idea of “just the facts,” hard news reporting. I fear that once journalists start giving their personal slant on the news, even if it is dressed up as “news analysis,” the audience no longer trusts the journalists to be as objective as is humanly possible.

Q: Are journalists biased?

            I get this question a lot from audiences. The simple answer is that journalists, being human beings, naturally have feelings, but the professional ones try to keep their personal feelings from distorting the truth. The best ones are as objective as is humanly possible. Most journalists are decent and honorable, and want to find out the truth and report it to the public so that citizens can make informed decisions.

Q: What do you think about the future of journalism?

            It is impossible to predict, given the highly changeable nature of technology including the Internet as a means of gathering and distributing news, and changing market conditions, but in general I would say that there will always be a need for a reliable, truthful account of what is happening in the world. Although some printed newspapers and magazines are dying, and other changes are taking place, I remain optimistic about the survival of news media in one form or another.

Author Spotlight, Ted Geltner

Last King of the Sports Page by Ted Geltner
Part crusader, part comedian, Jim Murray was a once-in-a-generation literary talent who just happened to ply his trade on newsprint, right near the box scores and race results. During his lifetime, Murray rose through the ranks of journalism, from hard-bitten 1940s crime reporter, to national Hollywood correspondent, to the top sports columnist in the United States. In Last King of the Sports Page: The Life and Career of Jim Murray, Ted Geltner chronicles Jim Murray’s experiences with twentieth-century American sports, culture, and journalism.

Q: Why did you choose to write about Jim Murray?

If you talk to 10 working sports writers in America, nine of them will tell you that Murray was their hero. He’s the patron saint of sports writing. Everybody who cares about sports journalism can quote their favorite Murray line. One writer told me that if there was a Bartlett’s Book of Quotations for sports, Murray would own 75 percent of the lines.  

Another reason that Murray is a great story is the length and breadth of his career. He wrote for 60 years, and by the time he started writing his famous sports column for the L.A. Times, he had already spent 20 years in the business. He’d covered famous crimes, Hollywood stars and starlets, and helped launch Sports Illustrated. And that was all before he typed his first sentence for the Times.

Q: What were the challenges you faced?

Well, Murray wrote over 10,000 columns. At first I thought I would read all of them, but pretty quickly I realized that it would take several years and eventually cause my head to explode. It illustrated to me what an incredibly prolific writer Murray was. For decades, he was writing six sports columns a week, every week. And he rarely missed a column.

Q: What was your favorite part of writing the book?

I loved digging into Murray’s old files and discovering material about his early career. I knew a little about his sports writing, but not much about his work for Time, and the old Los Angeles Examiner. He kept everything, so I would find 60-year-old memos to Time editors about Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando, or stories about small-time fights he covered, never published. And since Murray always wanted to be a screenwriter or a playwright, it was interesting to find the unpublished screenplays and television pilots that he must have labored over in between baseball and football games.

Q: What was Murray’s favorite sport?

It’s difficult to say, but it would probably be golf. Early in his career, baseball was the most popular sport in America by far, so he wrote about it all the time. But golf was the one sport he both covered and played, so he had a different perspective on it, and incredible admiration for it stars. He always said Ben Hogan was his favorite athlete. He must have really loved the sport, because all his friends said he was a terrible player, but it was his only real form of recreation. He wrote dozens of columns making fun of his own ineptitude.  

Q: What would Murray think about today’s media environment?

He would hate it. Murray never liked change. He didn’t want to switch from manual to electric typewriters, and then he didn’t want to give up his typewriter and work on a computer. He had to be dragged into the modern era. But he always managed to adapt, and he might have flourished in the age of Twitter. Most of his best lines come in at well below 140 characters.