Citizenship | Literature
Select novels, short stories, and nonfiction on contemporary life.
What began as a bold experiment in grassroots service produced future ambassadors to help guide U.S. diplomacy through seven decades of global upheaval.
Read, Listen, Watch
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Good morning, Jon. Thank you for being here this morning. Thank you for having me. I didn’t know you also did morning programs. Actually, I think I just stayed up too late. What time is it? Let’s get right to it, shall we? After 17 years of attacking the schmucks in the media and in government, there…
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Jonathan Ashley crams a lot into The Cost of Doing Business, from ghetto shootouts with Tec-9s to sociological laments about middle class norms. It’s got elements of the tough-talking hood narrative, and the book is entertaining in places, but ultimately much of the action is muddled by drawn out sentences and the narrator’s distracted observations. What…
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Just stumbled upon Stuart Beaton‘s podcast featuring my old buddy Preston Lang. The conversation between the two is thoughtful and funny, a mirror of Lang’s writing. If you like noir, pick up The Blind Rooster; if you like crime fiction, it’s The Carrier, both released last year. As for this podcast: Do we really need a 90,000-word book…
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From DC’s skyline to its underground rail system, one has to wonder how the capital of our great Republic has come to symbolize so much decay and brokenness. Escalator outages pervade Metro, clogging the human flow. Congress teases us with shuttering the Department of Homeland Security, even in the face of recent threats. These perversions…
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O’Reilly is not a journalist. He’s not worth my time. My criticism of Brian Williams, by contrast, was a necessary purge. I’d liked his work and trusted it, so felt betrayed, let down, disappointed. As far as O’Reilly is concerned, the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman put it best: Brian Williams got suspended from NBC News because…
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I’ve been known to comment on various blogs: “I’ve never had writer’s block. I have no shortage of things to write about or the desire to write them. If I’m not writing, I’m chewing on it.” Ok. In January I blew through 20 chapters of a first draft. Four weeks and done, rough edges and all.…
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Did you know that Popular Online Vendor X bans “distasteful content” from honest reviews of the very books they’d be happy to sell you? That’s right: reviews of books full of obscenities sold on their site won’t be posted if those reviews contain the same profane, immoral, or distasteful content as the product they want you to buy. I tried for two weeks to…
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Vote for your favorite Peace Corps Book of 2014. People in the Peace Corps community know well the agency’s three goals: To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served To promote a better…
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A lot of excuses have been made on behalf of Brian Williams since his fabrications went public last week. None of them are good. None of them can buy back the credibility every journalist requires as their professional stock in trade. But I was surprised to find one of the worst excuses in The New…
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I don’t plan on writing porn any time soon. Probably never. But this article from today’s New York Times Magazine, about the life of one prolific pornographer, had me thinking about what I write and how I write it. The piece helped me calibrate the struggle against my greatest bane: The lack of time. I’m a career man with a job…
Ben East Books 