lauren byrne

Author Story

As she comes clattering up the marble steps of Dublin’s Westbury Hotel in her dagger-pointed boots, 23-year-old Cecelia Ahern looks more like an American Idol hopeful than the author of two international bestsellers. One—unintentionally complimentary—idea you’ll hear whispered around Dublin about her first book, P.S. I Love You, is the conviction that “she didn’t write it.” Another theory that’s often floated is that she owes her success to the fact that she is the daughter of Bertie Ahern, Ireland’s Taoiseach (prime minister) for what seems like forever. That’s the downside of being a phenomenon; no one’s prepared to take you at face value.

Vivacious and friendly, she tucks her vintage Fendi purse (a present from her grateful agent) behind her on the couch and settles back for a chat, her conversation sprinkled with the sort of asides that reveal her impeccable writer’s credentials. “I got out of bed the other morning because I had these sentences going around in my head, so I just had to put them down on paper,” she says at one point, and in another confessional moment, reveals with a giggle. “I’ve always written, even when I couldn’t write. I have copybooks of my pretend writing, pages of squiggles. In my head it was a story, though there was nothing there.”

It’s because she looks like the kid sister of Tinkerbell whose image decorates her tiny tee-shirt that it’s hard to attribute to her the discipline required to publish two books in two years, with another in the works. But she’s young enough to enjoy all the traveling promoting her books has involved. “Last year was the busiest year in my life. It was fantastic,” she says, sipping a pineapple juice.  “The book was coming out in a different country every month so I was traveling all the time. I got back from Iceland and started promoting my second. But it’s great. It’s not something I don’t want to do.”

The story goes that Cecelia wrote P.S. I Love You in three months having dropped out of film school. While the book was still underway her mother arranged for an agent to see it who quickly sold it to HarperCollins for 300,000 pounds, and a few weeks later Hyperion in the US paid $1m for a two-book deal. Being 22, blonde, and the daughter of the Irish prime minister certainly gained her the attention of the likes of Vogue, W, and People magazines, who were all soon lining up to interview the novice writer. But her credentials alone aren’t the reason the book was a bestseller in 40 countries, or why Wendy Finerman (of Forest Gump fame) is currently working on the screenplay.

Death was the awfully big subject the 21-year-old took on in her first novel, and it’s the reason it appealed to octogenarians as well as tweens, to males as well as females. The artfully plotted  P.S. I Love You tells the tale of a young widow who is helped through her bereavement by a series of letters her husband left behind for her. Its treatment of the process of bereavement is insightful, which, in combination with her little girl looks, made some older readers doubtful that she had written the book.

“I don’t why I chose that topic,” she says. “It’s the one thing that we have in common: we’re going to lose people. I suppose I was thinking about what it would be like to lose someone from my own family, and because I’m a writer, when I can’t get something out of my head I just have to put it down on paper. The idea of leaving all the letters was a way of being positive, of looking on the bright side.”

The amateur psychologist might point to the breakup of her parents marriage when she was 6 years old as a plausible, if facile, reason for her ability to contemplate the dark side of life. It could also explain her fondness for living in her imagination. After the split, Cecelia and older sister, Georgina, were raised by their mother in the seaside town of Malahide, north of Dublin city. Mostly removed from the bustle of their father’s political career, Cecelia attended school in the area, and afterwards did a three year course in media communications, before dropping out of film studies after two days.

Talking with her by phone last year shortly after P.S. came out in the U.S, Cecelia’s voice turned distinctly wary when I mentioned her politician dad. “I think we got to see him more than some of my friends saw their fathers,” she said then. “We got to see him on Sunday for the whole day. We’d go to a football match with him. And Dublin’s small so we never felt too far from him.”

This time she seems more relaxed when I point to the blurb on the back of the American edition of her second book, Rosie Dunne  (published by Hyperion in February), which describes her as the daughter of Ireland’s prime minister, and ask if she minds.  “ I can understand its marketing potential. They don’t mention it here or the UK because everyone knows here. But in America, with so many Irish-Americans, it’s nice if they can make a connection. But I’m not annoyed, it’s who I am, and he’s my family.”

“Work seems to energize him,” she says, when I mention seeing him at the ended of a packed day in Boston some years ago, still energetically pumping hands at 4:00A.M. Irish time.  “I’m not like my dad. I need time to be alone and do nothing,” she adds.

But, having just submitted her third novel in two years, it may be she’s more like him than she knows. There’s more evidence in the Ahern household to suggest that family is destiny. At around the time that Cecelia netted her $1m book deal, sister Georgina earned her first million (in euros) when she sold the exclusive photo rights to her wedding to Nicky Byrne, a member of Irish boy band Westlife, to Hello! magazine; which earned a roasting for her dad from an irate Irish media, and had Paul O’Connor in An Phoblacht, decrying the cult of celebrity that has taken over in Ireland.

Cecelia confides that, the wedding behind her, sister Georgina is going back to college to do a business degree. Best friends, the two sisters have very different interests. Cecelia’s publishing success has, however, brought other writers in the family to light. “There’s lots of people in the family, who if they had the opportunity, would have written. It’s just that they got into a job and stayed there. But you know what’s really funny? People never talked about it, it’s only since my books have come out that have.”

Interest in Georgina’s pop pedigree undoubtedly contributed to the sales of Cecelia’s first book. And there is at least a passing reference to her brother-in-law’s band. “When I was writing the book for myself, I put them in,” she explains, “then when it sold I thought I should take it out, but realized that taking out the references was discriminating against them so I left them in.”

Her second book came out only months after the first. Where the Rainbow Ends, its title in Ireland and the UK (it was released in the US under the title Cecelia originally gave it, Rosie Dunne) is a tale of love in the age of e-mails and text messages, and tells the story of the growing love between a boy and a girl separated by the Atlantic Ocean. It went straight to # 1 in the Irish Times bestseller list and, judging by the ecstatic comments on various Internet book sites, didn’t disappoint her younger readers.

Where can you go when you start out at the top?  “I’m not overly ambitious,” she answers. “All this has happened because I’ve had a passion for something and I’ve worked hard. I’m really, really lucky. I wanted to do a master’s in film production, and if I had, especially now, I’d still be making coffee for people. I didn’t choose an easy way, but it worked.

“The enjoyment of writing was enough for me. It wasn’t that I wanted to see my book on a shelf. I just wanted to see if I had the potential to do it. But I would still be writing if I hadn’t been published.”

It remains to be seen how her fans respond, but mention of her just finished third novel now in the hands of her publishers sets her reeling. “I absolutely adore it. I don’t want to say it was my favorite, but it was really special. I didn’t want to finish it, which is great, I’m glad I’m not getting tired to writing.

Her future will also hold marriage and children (“I definitely want to have children,” she says.) And more books, and who knows what else. When you’re a phenomenon, anything is possible.

Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole

It’s a week after the Democratic National Convention, and Boston’s 37th Police Commissioner is warily eyeing my tape recorder. Since taking up the job 6 months ago, the city’s first woman commissioner, Kathleen O’Toole, has had to deal with a police strike, the security nightmare of the first post-9/11 political convention, and a sharp rise in crime, yet what she seems most uncomfortable with at the moment is this reporter’s gaze and gadgets. “I’d rather have you talk more about the Boston Police Department and less about me,” she says.

I’d like to oblige. But there’s a problem. Kathleen, familiarly known as Kathy, O’Toole exudes affability. Welcome or not, she invites a kind of relaxed camaraderie even in the anonymous and unexpectedly sleek boardroom of Boston Police HQ where we’re sitting. Given the opportunity, who wouldn’t prefer to find out how this modest 49-year-old woman, who joined the police force on a dare 25 years ago, has made it to the top?

O’Toole describes herself as a “situational leader;” happy to let her people get on with it, but unafraid to make snap decisions when called for. Organizing security for the recent political convention allowed her plenty of scope for both. Decidedly not the economic bonanza the city fathers promised; the media made much of the Guantanamo-style pen allocated to demonstrators outside the convention’s Fleet Center location and blamed draconian security levels for turning the city into a ghost town.

“No way,” O’Toole says, quietly but firmly contradicting the prevailing views about security overkill. “We’d have been totally irresponsible if we didn’t put a plan of that nature in place. And I think that that plan could very well have been a deterrent. Not only to potential terror activity, but to public order. There were some great demonstrations all week long at other venues, but for some reason everyone kept focusing on this 2,900-square-foot area adjacent to the Fleet Center. The demonstrators were actually closer to the delegates than they’ve actually ever been in the history of these conventions, but we had a responsibility to maintain safety as well, and the site became symbolic of the security, when in reality we were trying desperately to accommodate the demonstrators. So I found that frustrating, because we tried so hard.”

Kathy O’Toole was appointed Boston’s Police Commissioner in the wake of tragedy. On Super Bowl Sunday, the New England Patriots’ win sent jubilant fans rampaging through the city and led to the death of a 21-year-old man. It did nothing for the image of the Boston Police Department (nor his future job prospects) that then Acting Police Commissioner James Hussey had taken the evening off. An inquiry initiated by O’Toole has introduced changes to forestall a similar event, but being absent from her post when a major event is in progress is not O’Toole’s style. She may see her gender as an irrelevant quantity, but successful women are the last to register just how much harder they work than their male counterparts.

At the same time, she’s secure enough not to feel she has to ape her male peers. “By nature, I understand that our role in policing often has to be tough enforcement,” she say, “but I think it’s very important to show compassion as well; whether you’re a man or a woman, and I haven’t hesitated to show compassion.”

Her boss, Boston’s Mayor Tom Menino, has no regrets about his choice. “I’m very proud of her,” he said in a telephone conversation. “She’s been able to reach out to Boston’s diverse neighborhoods and shown real leadership during difficult times.”

Coming on board last February, O’Toole had four months to get up to speed for the convention. Just weeks before it, Boston’s police force, angry over unmet pay demands, threatened to picket the event. That crisis resolved in the nick of time, the city’s police won kudos for their nonconfrontational style and helpful demeanor. Working 18 to 20 hour days, O’Toole was everywhere. “I made sure I got out there to every single area where our men were posted. It’s really important to show your concern for the people who are working for you, and they genuinely appreciate it. I’m not the type of leader who would sit at my desk at HQ; I’m just not inclined to do that.”

In her wildest dreams young Kathy Horton never imagined she’d one day be a police officer, let alone the police commissioner. The force wasn’t an option for young girls when Kathy was a high schooler in Marblehead, Mass., where she lived with her parents, brother and sister after a move from the Berkshires. While a student at Boston College, she took the police exams as a practice run for law school exams and to lend moral support to a friend. Enrolled at the New England School of Law she learned she had earned a place in the police force. On a dare she took the job, intending to stay a couple of years and see the law from a different perspective. She did complete her law degree but only to gain a different perspective on policing.

“Those were my favorite days,” she says of being on the beat in downtown Boston, confessing it was the adrenaline charge that hooked her. “In fact there are days when I’d love to just go out there and do that again. One minute we’d respond to a domestic violence situation; the next minute it would be a bank robbery, or helping to deliver a baby. That excitement and the ability to really make a difference in people’s lives is just so personally rewarding.”

Job satisfaction is paramount to O’Toole—proof is the two-thirds pay cut she accepted to become commissioner. It’s a trait she picked up from her schoolteacher father. “He absolutely loved what he did. Every single morning he went to work with a smile on his face. He always emphasized to us that it was far more important to love your work than have some huge financial rewards.”

O’Toole’s zeal for the job clearly neutralized any potential sexist responses to a female ascending the career ladder. She became Chief of the Metropolitan Police, later a lieutenant colonel in the State Police, and in 1994, was appointed State Secretary of Public Safety. 

In 1998, she was invited onto the commission headed by Chris Patten and set up to reform the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland. Like others, Patten was impressed by O’Toole’s approachability and devotion to duty. In 1999, the Commission published its recommendations for reform. Not all of the reforms have been implemented, but O’Toole is content with how things are progressing.

“I’ve been to Belfast a few times this past year and seen police officers on ordinary walking beats, and it’s so reassuring to see that, rather than the armored Land Rovers and the police with fully automated weapons. I think sometimes people lose sight of the progress they’ve made because they’re immersed in it.”

O’Toole’s time in Belfast deepened her interest in her Irish roots, reviving connections with her mother’s Gallagher relations and her husband’s O’Toole relations. Between them, she reckons, they have hundreds of cousins in the Athlone area. Meghan, her daughter, subsequently studied philosophy at Trinity College, providing O’Toole with another reason to continue spending time in Ireland. In Boston too, the Patten Commission produced some unexpected encounters. Isolde Moylan, Boston’s Irish Consul, likes to remember how her friendship with O’Toole began:

“Being very much aware of Kathy's very important role as a member of that Commission, I was delighted that the very first phone call I received on my first day as Consul General in Boston was from Kathy. Although the call turned out to have been purely accidental—Kathy was calling the Consulate on some other matter and had inadvertently dialed my direct line—we ended up in a lengthy and warm conversation, the first of many! In the time I have known her, I have been impressed not only by Kathy's keen intelligence but also her great warmth, her generosity of spirit, and, perhaps more than anything, her very clear call to service.”

In her signature dark pantsuit and crisply coifed hair, O’Toole summons up comparisons with Helen Mirren’s policewoman character in PBS’s Prime Suspect. But Mirren’s character has achieved success at the expense of her personal life. In O’Toole’s case, her personal life has complemented her work life. Married since 1982 to Dan O’Toole, a motor cycle officer and arson investigator until he retired, it was he who first encouraged her to enter the police force, accurately perceiving that she had the right disposition.

“No question that my husband and my daughter would say that they have always been the number one priority,” she says without hesitation. “I’m just very, very fortunate that they’ve been as supportive. And they’ve enjoyed it, too. It’s been a family experience.”

Daughter Meghan concurs. “It was definitely very cool having parents as police officers.” She admits though, that the policing gene has passed her by. She prefers writing and has plans for a career in film. “Mum’s profession always provided great material.”

A recent rash of shootings in Boston playgrounds has put extra police patrols on the streets and community leaders demanding action. O’Toole is sanguine. “It will pass because we know to address it.” She believes the violence is the result of the recent reentry from prison of high numbers sent there in the 90s, and is enthusiastic about a pilot program that earmarks inmates prior to release and is equipping them with a mentor and literacy and job training skills.

O’Toole’s PR commander has knocked on the door, putting an end to a pleasant conversation. O’Toole rises; after all, it is a working day. Later, in September, she’s got plans for a holiday—of sorts. “Last year I helped organize this Garda/USA golf challenge and we had reps from the Garda Siochána come over to play the Boston police. We raised $18,000 for Children’s Hospital. Now they’ve asked us to go there.” At the doorway she adds, “So hopefully we’ll go over and defend our title,” delicately conveying the information that she and her team won. Naturally.

Movie Review: Kinsey

Kinsey
Starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow
Directed by Bill Condon
Written by Bill Condon

 
A movie about sex was bound to be interesting, but Bill Condon’s bio pic based on the life of Alfred Kinsey exceeds all expectations. Condon, whose last movie was Gods and Monsters and who wrote the screenplay for Chicago, has extracted some of the most convincing and unshowy performances from some of the best actors in Hollywood, supporting them with an excellent screenplay. The result is an utterly absorbing movie based on the life of the man who revealed the sexual proclivities of Americans.

While still in the making, this movie was causing a stir. The Concerned Women for America organization deplored it (without having seen it) and Judith Reisman, author of Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences, begged Liam Neeson not to ruin his career by playing Kinsey. All the agitation suggests Alfred Kinsey invented sex, not just investigated it. Perhaps in a way he did.

An exceptional biology student who earned his doctorate at Harvard, by the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) had established a lackluster academic career at Indiana University based on his study of the gall wasp. Invited to give classes to faculty and married students on the topic of sex, Kinsey discovered how little scientific information was available on the subject. With help from a team of graduate students (Chris O’Neill, Peter Sarsgaard, and Timothy Hutton, hardly recognizable in their respective roles as Kinsey’s assistants, Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard), and with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey threw himself into researching the sex life of Americans. His findings, exploding cherished beliefs about the detrimental consequences of masturbation, and revealing the surprising prevalence of homosexuality, appeared in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, an instant worldwide bestseller. His follow-up book in 1953, Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, which revealed that women, when not treated like pin cushions, could actually enjoy sex, was not so rapturously received. Congress was persuaded that Kinsey’s findings was a communist plot to weaken the moral fiber of American women and the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its funding. Although Condon’s ending is upbeat, subsequent claims about Kinsey’s faulty research methods; gossip about sex movies he made in his attic, and controversy surrounding his research into pedophilia, all contributed to the scientist’s vilification. 

There’s no use looking for literal truth in Condon’s depiction of Kinsey and the people who surrounded him. Hollywood mythologizes, it doesn’t document. And as the Beautiful Mind controversy of a few years ago reveals; untidy facts can interfere with a satisfying story. Condon’s unequivocal endorsement of Kinsey is clear, but he does attempt to deal with some of the criticisms that have mired Kinsey’s reputation; showing him as a brilliant, complicated man, damaged by his abusive, prudish father, Alfred Seguine Kinsey. As Kinsey’s overbearing father, himself victimized as a child, John Lithgow is a treat to watch railing against such shameful modern inventions as the zip fastener. But Kinsey the scientist is shown perpetuating the same kind of bullying attitude toward his own son. The emotional cost of some of the sexual experimentation Kinsey and his staff engaged in is also part of Condon’s story. The movie skirts around one of the more controversial aspects of Kinsey’s research: that he interviewed pedophiles and didn’t report them for criminal activity. In a scene in which Kinsey’s assistant Martin abandons in disgust an interview with a pedophile, Kinsey also expresses his revulsion, but plausibly continues the interview in the interests of scientific advancement.

The real Kinsey, despite his ungainly hairstyle and rigid features, was by all reports a charismatic man. As played by Liam Neeson, he is irresistible. An actor who seems only able to convincingly play exceptional men–Oskar Schindler, Michael Collins, Rob Roy–Neeson clearly reveled in this role and brings an exceptional degree of emotional honesty to it. Laura Linney matches him as Kinsey’s dowdy, devoted wife, Clara, who was deeply hurt by Kinsey’s sexual relations with his assistant Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard), but whose reasons for her own sexual activity with Martin is not made clear. Was it for pleasure, in the interests of science, or to even the score? Seeking answers to such questions will probably result in healthy sales for Kinsey’s biographers.

"Kill Paul"

"Kill Paul!" The other day I came across that bald statement in an old notebook of mine. A rapid survey of the one or two Paul's I know confirmed that they were, to my knowledge at least, still upright and mobile. Then I remembered. This particular Paul was an inconvenient character in a mystery novel I'd once written. Paul didn't get killed because I never finished it. He's still sitting in a café in Dublin, recounting his tale of accidental involvement with a lurid group of characters who perpetrated nefarious acts too often and too varied for even their creator to keep track of them-hence my frequent need to kill off inconvenient characters like Paul.

Some years ago I heard on radio a well-known writer cautioning against writing as an amateur pastime. It's too lonely and isolating, she said, and when you have no possibility of being published, what's the point? Take up painting, she insisted. Pictures of lopsided houses and portraits with squashed noses will always find a home with a fond granny or indulgent Aunty Betty. "Why did you ever hang that picture?" I once asked my mother about one of my own fervent attempts that had graced the space above her mantelpiece for many years. "Because you thought it was good, dear," she clinically replied.

Who needs that kind of indulgence? The amateur writer is made of sterner stuff. And besides there are other compensations besides flattery.

You can rub out characters and create new ones with the ease of a god. Experience the joy of control that life has a peevish way of always denying you.

In an unpublished work you can be as inept as you like and never have to suffer the acid comments-or what may be worse, the blind indifference-of critics. Before I abandoned my mystery novel I planned to have Paul rush out of the café and get squashed by an oncoming car. Highly unlikely considering Dublin's traffic problems, where a tortoise could safely amble for weeks, incurring nothing more than a layer of, albeit toxic, exhaust fumes.

And then there was the pleasure of stepping into my heroine's Manolo Blahniks. I'm short and quiet. She was tall and outgoing. She was married like me. But after only five minutes in her company my hero was deeply in love, and without any prompting from me, all my other male characters responded to her with a similar kind of trembling attention.

"People will continue to write novels," Kurt Vonnegut, that granddaddy of American literature, believes, "because they discover that they are treating their own neuroses."

When I think of the endless trips to the mall I didn't make (another form of neuroses treatment) because I was busy scribbling away. Not to mention the psychiatrist's bills I might have paid out one difficult year had I not learned to forget in a world of my own creation. When I think of these things, I'm eternally grateful to my cast of characters. Two-dimensional, wooden, some might say, but they pulled me through like the best of friends do.

Nowadays they live in the 0s and 1s of a backup file in my computer. Still, I'll admit, if I thought that an editor would be willing to as much as move my novel from one side of her desk to the other, I'd have it parceled up and out of here in a nano second. For what, after all, is life without hope, especially for a writer?

Book Review: City of Poets: 18 Boston Voices edited by Don DiVecchio, Doug Holder and Richard Wilhelm

Singing Bone Press

The great thing about a collection of poetry like this is that it offers such a variety of perspectives, choice of subjects, range of moods. And yet, ultimately, such disparate voices serve to remind us most of what it is we have in common; our shared capacity for wonder, confusion, resilience, indifference, grief, joy. In short, what it is to be human.

“We wanted to fly in the face of elitism,” Don DiVecchio, one of the editors and a contributor, said, explaining the impetus for bringing together such a mix of published and previously unpublished poets. Among those invited to contribute work there was, according to Doug Holder’s Introduction to the book, “ a seventy-year-old man with a long artistic résumé, and a thirty-year-old woman trying to create one. There were a couple of old-guard leftists, and a few from the opposite side of the fence. Several were mothers of young children, trying to squeeze this meeting into their demanding schedules. One of the poets was a fine art and rare book dealer, while another was on the brink of homelessness.”

In this collection, Holder and DiVecchio realized their plan to bring together a “city” of poets. Not a city as we increasingly understand the term: a “homogenous, generic and gentrified center with high income young urban professionals, “ as Holder describes it, but an ideal city where all races, genders, ages are free to express their individuality and yet share a feeling of community.

And since Boston and its surrounding cities are daily morphing from the eclectic to the homogenous, this book at times reads like a kind of elegy, especially when these changes are also the subject of a poem, as in Richard Cambridge’s “Meditation for Cambridge.” But there’s much here that is consoling too.

Whether or not it’s intentional, at times there is a conversational feel to the book, as when one poem continues a theme of another, and in the way all the poems offer comments on each other, enlarging their meanings.

“Too much sun, too much fried food, too much sand in your car, rainy day/ shopping at places your wallet should shrink from,” Linda Haviland Conte laments in “Cape Grandeur,” juxtaposing our capacity for detritus with nature’s grander yet simpler creations. The sea, “miraculously leaving the fabulous flotsam/of nature’s own more perfect inventions: polished stones, gull feathers, kelp.”

Across the page, in “Forever Now,” Jack Powers takes the theme of the sea in another direction. He writes of where “the sea meets the land/ in the beautifully constant tension of change.” But he offers one of the most satisfyingly succinct descriptions for life too, since it is also about “the beautifully constant tension of change.”

In “Earth Song,” Don DiVecchio reminds us that we are made of the sea, “We are of salt, ocean and pitched pine/ The sun’s heat moves within us—We belong to each other, move together/ Need each other.” In turn, DiVecchio’s resonant lines about our shared origin and dependence upon each other deepens the implications of Richard Cambridge’s angry lament for rent hikes displacing longtime inhabitants and making others homeless in Cambridge. In “Meditation for Cambridge” he asks rhetorically, “Have our hearts frozen over? Is that what is permitting us/ to do this? We see the ones trapped beneath the ice/ but we can’t hear their cries and they are hardly moving.”

Living in a city we can see the same sights so often they fail to register until a poem like Dorian Brooks “Gift” provides some fresh perspectives. “I am the one you cannot see, though I lie on the sidewalk/ at your feet, an old newspaper/ for cover. I am the one/ you cannot hear.” But this is not the usual appeal to help the homeless. Instead the homeless have something to offer us: the knowledge “that the only home/ is the human heart, the only currency/ her wild inheritance.”

Perhaps our true dilemma is that we always take more than we need. Marc Goldfinger’s “The Butterfly In The Box” spins a vivid allegory of the glamour of power and its careless destruction.

And even as we see ourselves as lords of the universe, the chasm of our insecurities can open at our feet at any moment. Are we giants or midgets? Gods or clowns? In “The Life of the Party,” Doug Holder holds up a mirror and reveals with wry dexterity our conflicted natures. In the first stanza, the subject is strutting about at a party, feeling wildly pleased with himself, “you were/ the center/ the words/ fell like pearls/ from your mouth….” A second stanza, in the bathroom later, reveals the same character cut down to size by the mirror’s indifferent reflection. Now he is merely man, “short and bald/ struggling with his fly/ his eyes red rimmed and bulging/”

Mercifully our capacity for joy can sometimes make our bumbling humanity bearable, as shown in a poem like “In Ecstasy I Sing” by Harris Gardner, who elsewhere equally well evokes our fretful self-absorbed natures.

“Today I received the gifts/ you left for me. They remind me of our strengths; the power that is ours to claim,” Lainie Senechal writes in “To May Stevens” after seeing an exhibition of her paintings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. “You have provided the craft/ for our voyage over a sea of words…. It was never a question/of knowing were we are going, but rather what effort will be/required to reach the other shore.”

Senechal’s lines are an oblique reminder of what this collection also gives its readers: the consolation and the courage that all art provides as we make our troubled way through the world. A book as multifaceted as City of Poets

The Spirit of Inquiry: An Interview with Frank McCourt, author of 'Tis

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has," anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed.

Frank McCourt arrived at fame the hard way. Before he was a best-selling author he was a public school teacher. "Public school teachers are heroic" he pronounced with conviction at Harvard on September 30 when he read from his latest book "'Tis" and answered audience questions. In his 30 years as a public school teacher he taught 33,000 lessons to 11,000 kids, so he knows what he's talking about when he complains about how the spirit of inquiry gets lost in the deadening attention to grades and scores and percentages. For McCourt, the multiple-question exam rates up there with Nazism in its destructiveness.

The hallowed halls of the Harvard Graduate School of Education seemed the perfect setting for McCourt to talk about the value of education and the discovery of the soul through literature. Unintentionally, the setting also provided ironic proof of his criticisms. Before McCourt was introduced, the best part of an hour was given over to talk about the successful capital fund program in progress at the Graduate School. Neil Rudenstein, Harvard's head, rolled off numbers with the precision of an accountant on the eve of tax returns day. The huge crowd that couldn't be accommodated in the main hall and spilled over into a second room to view McCourt's reading via camera projected onto a large screen, clearly had not come to listen to such talk and showed their impatience with mounting chatter. McCourt himself, when he finally got up to read, observed wryly that Neil Rudenstein had left the hall; presumably because the more important matters of the evening had now been dealt with.

It's a toss-up whether McCourt is a better speaker or a better writer. He has a prodigious gift of the gab. His honesty is leavened with humor and he appears to have experienced too many of life's heartbreaks to be lulled into the arrogance that his current spectacular popularity might be expected to evoke. For a crowd of five or six hundred he can create the intimacy of a chat over a glass of beer in a quiet pub somewhere.

In "Angela's Ashes," McCourt put a face on the poverty endured by the poor of Ireland in the 30s and 40s. There he wrote of his education that ended when he was 14. He attended, as most Irish did, a national school whose system was inherited from Victorian England and remained essentially unchanged until quite recently. It was an education of memorization; a system of conditioning generations of children not to question authority, not to answer back. McCourt declared that the words, "Abandon hope all ye you enter here," should have been emblazoned over the gate of his school.

All that grimness was redeemed in "Angela's Ashes" by the dream of escape to the New World. The19-year-old McCourt scraped and stole until he finally had the means to purchase a ticket on a freighter going to America. And when the ship docked in Albany he was invited to a party on shore where he got laid for the first time in his life. It was the perfect ending.

But it was only the beginning really, and "'Tis," his latest best-selling book, takes us up to date. His self-esteem long ago knocked out of him in school and with rotten teeth and an eye condition that kept his eyes perpetually gummed up with yellow pus, he had now to make his way in a world of well-fed, white-teethed Americans. The Korean War saved him. He was drafted into the army and after the predictable rigors of non-combat army life he was released back into the world—only now he had the means of getting a third-level education thanks to the GI Bill.

In the admissions office of NYU, however, they laughed at him when he said he hadn't graduated from high school. But he had read Melville and Dostoyevski and that impressed them enough to let him into their teacher training school.

He dreamed of teaching "blond, blue-eyed boys all named Chuck and long-legged Episcopalians with apocalyptic bosoms," he told us, but instead he found himself working at McKee Vocational School, where his one pleasure was in reading the roll call because it sounded like an Italian opera.

In "'Tis," McCourt provides several mordantly funny description of his early days at McKee. He makes it sound as if teaching the average group of teenagers in a public school is the quickest road to insanity. At Harvard he expanded on the subject. "The American teenager is an explosive creature," McCourt said, suggesting that if the US government was serious about getting rid of Hussein, they only had to drop 1000 American teenagers into Baghdad—with their boomboxes.

A constant motif of McCourt's book is the immigrant so aware of the value of education that he or she is almost a slave to the idea of achieving it. There's Horace from Jamaica who worked with McCourt at a dockside warehouse. He ignored racist slurs and ate his lunch alone because his white workmates wouldn't include him, putting up with it all because he was putting his son through college. And Bridie, the night cleaner at an office McCourt once worked in, who refused to spend money to make her job a little easier because she too had a son to educate. Later, McCourt taught a group of mostly African-American women and women from the Islands who all agreed that "education was the only road to sanity."

But for the kids of McKee, education meant endless hours of boredom, relieved only by the amount of disruption they could incur in any given class. They expended all their imaginative powers in finding ways not to read required texts such as "The Scarlet Letter" and "Vanity Fair." Once, in his early days there, McCourt briefly whet their appetite for reading when he departed from the curriculum and gave them instead the then current "Catcher in the Rye." But parents complained about its suggestive content and McCourt had to resume the battle over "Vanity Fair."

Maybe McCourt's Old World education wasn't a complete waste if it was there that he learned how to persevere. Though day after day he failed miserably to excite any interest in his students for their subject, he continued to search for ways to engage them. It was only his dogged determination to win them over that kept him going. Why else keep at it? The pay was bad and there was no prestige attached to teaching. "No one listens to teachers. They are pitied for their salaries," McCourt writes in "'Tis." He recounts the response he got when he returned to Ireland on a holiday, "When I tell them I'm a teacher they seem disappointed. Only a teacher. Lord above, Frankie McCourt, we thought you'd be a millionaire by now. Sure wasn't your brother Malachy here with his glamorous model of a wife and isn't he an actor and everything."

Everything came late for McCourt. Now in his sixties, he is enjoying fame in such abundance some god must have decided to make it up to him for all the earlier decades of obscurity. ("Angela's Ashes" has been translated into 24 languages and has sold over 5000 million copies; the movie will be out at Christmas.) Things came late to him in teaching too. He spent years as frustrated as his students by the conventional methods of education. Out of school he embarked on a shaky first marriage and lived in the shadow of his more successful brother Malachy. In 1959, his mother Angela came for a holiday that lasted the rest of her life, worrying McCourt with her unwillingness to do much beyond put on weight and complain about the lack of a decent cup of tea in New York.

McCourt admitted to us that he had no great brain, only stumbling across the truth from time to time. But finally, through trial and error and enormous gobs of humor he found ways to engage his students and himself enjoy the act of teaching in the process.

"Teenagers are like heat-seeking missiles," he said, with the bemused look of someone who has returned from a war not quite certain how he survived. "You better have energy, because they have, and they'll suck it out of you… You have to get them dancing your dance with you." For McCourt, the secret was to challenge his students, never to provide them with answers, always to leave them with questions, knowing that the spirit of inquiry is the first, necessary step on the road of learning.

For all his disparaging quips about that strange animal the American teenager, it's clear that McCourt loved his students and reveled in finding ways to ignite their interest. And they educated him too, he said. For the 30 years he spent in public schools he was learning about literature, about writing and about the workings of the human heart. If "'Tis" is the polished outcome of those years, the American public school system can't be all bad.

A More Hopeful Way to Live: An Interview with Paul Rogat Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has," anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed.

Virginia Ramirez, living in one of the poorer sections of San Antonio, Texas, probably wasn't thinking about Margaret Mead—she may never even have heard of her—when she learned of the death of her neighbor, brought on by a chill she'd contracted because she couldn't get assistance to have her leaky roof repaired. With only her 8th grade education and her anger to fuel her, Mrs. Ramirez set out to find someone to complain to. Instead she discovered that if anything were to be done to prevent further needless deaths, she would have to do it herself. Haltingly at first, her stomach a knot of anxiety, she began to hold community meetings in her home, then moved on to addressing local politicians who told her that nobody considered it worthwhile spending money on her part of town. Eventually she ended up testifying before Congress and ultimately got the funding her neighborhood desperately needed.

Virginia Ramirez's inspiring story is just one of many collected by social activist Paul Rogat Loeb in Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Time of Cynicism, a book that examines the psychology of community involvement: why some people get involved and what stops the rest of us from doing so.

Loeb's object in writing the book, he explained during a recent trip to Boston, was not to provoke guilt for not being more involved, but to show us that we can find ways to correct the things that are wrong in society and make choices that will allow us to live more hopefully as a consequence. "A lot of people feel they would like to do something," said Loeb, working his way through a late afternoon lunch at Au Bon Pain in Cambridge, "but they don't feel that their efforts can make any difference. If you turn on the network news you don't get a sense that your efforts can make a difference. You get a sense that, well, maybe there's some very special people that can make a change—the saints, the Mother Teresas, the Martin Luther Kings, or the crazies, but not regular people."

Change, Loeb points out in his book, is the result of deliberate, incremental actions by mere mortals, not saints. "I did an interview on CNN with Rosa Parks," he said, repeating an incident from his book, "and the presenter said, 'One day she refused to move to the back of the bus and helped start the civil rights movement.' Now that's true as far as it goes, but it leaves out that for 12 years she was working with the NCAAP in Montgomery, Alabama, trying to make change. Her action on the bus was one of many things she did. But if she hadn't done all those other things, she wouldn't have taken that step and there wouldn't have been the community response to her gesture. So it goes back to the notion of saints. We put people on a pedestal, believing they just act and instantly make change, and we don't see the long and hard work that goes into it. We just don't understand what it takes to make change."

While Loeb was writing Soul of a Citizen he was provided with trenchant proof of his theory that we have ceased to know how to make change. During that time the Welfare Reform Bill was initiated and passed, but those most concerned—welfare recipients, workers in the field—remained quiet throughout the process. Curious about the silence, Loeb asked people working with low-income families what they thought about the reforms. "Most of them thought it was very bad," he said. "The people who would defend it were most distant from the problem, but the people I spoke to said it would make things worse. I asked them if they did anything to express their concerns, write a letter, call a Congressman. Well, no, they answered. Why? Because I didn't think it would do any good, because I didn't think I'd be listened to. And those voices were silent during the debate, or non-debate I should say. And in a field that Clinton vetoed twice, now you know, if he'd heard from lots and lots of people—he's not somebody of strong convictions—he would have said, OK, I'm going to wait until we come up with something better. And so that silence of the people who could have been involved was very, very bad. For those people who want to work one-on-one, that's fine; but the challenge is to take what they have learned to the public square so that people who don't have their experience get to hear these perspectives that aren't being heard in society."

Loeb, who was thrown out of Stanford for his political activism during the Vietnam War, has spent the last thirty years examining issues of human involvement. After finishing his education at the New School for Research in New York City, he began working on a small political magazine called Liberation where he came in contact with the likes of Howard Zinn and Noam Chompsky. Now living in Seattle, he's an associated scholar at Seattle's Center for Ethical Leadership, but spends a lot of time on the road, collecting material for his books, speaking at colleges, and trying, as he put it, "to give people the perspectives, the stories that will inspire them to act."

Soul of a Citizen originated in a conversation Loeb had with a member of Real Change, Spare Change's sister paper in Seattle, also founded by Tim Harris. "They were doing an interview with me and afterward the person said, Well, you're going on about all these interesting issues that weren't in your last book and when I heard you talk at a bookstore everyone was asking these questions. Why don't you write a book directly about what it takes to get involved and stay involved? And that was its genesis."

Over lunch, Loeb summed up the impetus behind Soul of a Citizen and his previous books, Nuclear Culture: Living and Working in the World's Largest Atomic Complex, an exploration of the atomic power industry and the people who work in it; Hope in Hard Times, which focused on grass roots peace activists, and Generation at the Crossroads, for which he interviewed students at hundreds of colleges, disproving the Generation X Slacker-type stereotyps: "All along I've been asking the basic question, What does it mean to be a human being on the planet Earth? What do we owe to our fellow human beings and to the earth itself, and how can we live in a way that we can feel proud to pass on something to our kids."

The reviews of Soul of a Citizen have been very positive, often glowing, and social activists will no doubt welcome what he has to say, but is anyone else prepared to listen? Americans, according to Harvard political theorist Robert Putnam, have been steadily reducing not only their participation in voting, but in all forms of community involvement, including the PTA, the Boy Scouts, even the humble bowling league has suffered. Putnam's contention has been refuted by others, but you don't need very extensive research to tell you that watching TV, shopping, both high priority leisure activities, and even long commutes, must be eating into time once devoted to other, more socially involved activities.

"We say we're stressed out, we work too many jobs," said Loeb, answering the question as to whether we really have an excuse for not being more involved. "I think what's difficult now is that most of us have some level of material comfort, at the same time a lot of the support systems are fraying, so wages buy less than 25 years ago, and people are working about a month more than they were 30 years, and that doesn't include awful commutes. I don't think we're selfish. I think we're just distracted a lot of the time."

Add cynicism, which engenders apathy, to the mix and you've got an explanation, if not an apology, for why people have retreated into their own private worlds. In his book Loeb devotes a chapter to the "The Cynical Smirk," decrying the sort of hip, detached attitude that magazines and the media promote as being the only sort of attitude to express nowadays. We're far to knowing, the cynical smirk suggests, to trust anyone; people lie, but that's just how things are. Is anyone counting the destructive cost of such a pose? Loeb is, for one, when he points out in his book, "We now take our cynicism as much for granted as the air we breathe, making it as great a barrier to hope and meaningful public action as all the other barriers combined."

Many of the stories Loeb recounts are about people forced to take action when their livelihood or their community was threatened, so perhaps it is only when personal involvement is greatest that the passion for change is born.

"It helps to have something hit home," Loeb agreed. "There's no doubt about it. Nobody I know has ever been moved by statistics. It's about winning for yourself sometimes, but it's always about other people. A lot of time people see social activists and say, Oh, they're only trying to get their own selfish piece of the pie. Well, I suppose that's sometimes the way it is, but most of the time it's a sense of human solidarity, of sharing something in common with other people that drives them to take stands."

Of the people Loeb spoke to, all found themselves drawn into something much larger than they'd ever anticipated when they first vocalized their sense of injustice, but each was rewarded in ways they never dreamed of, in terms of personal fulfillment, personal growth, and increased friendships. "Not to minimize the difficulties," Loeb added, "but when people get involved they do really get a lot back."

And to all the people who don't find themselves working under terrible conditions or witnessing the demise of their community, Loeb says, "When I see someone with a sign that says, I'll work for food, I know there's more people like that out there, and I feel demeaned as a human being, But I don't have the money to give them all work, and so the issue has to be addressed as a social problem. And it reminds me that something is wrong with the world. It makes it less of a world that I want to live in; to have people living on the street, to have a watershed polluted, to have violence in our schools way more than any other country. So it may not be as direct as saying I'm being mistreated in the job, or my neighborhood is being discriminated against, but there is a sense that if I want to look myself in the mirror and feel good about myself as a human being, we need to address these problems. That may be a more indirect form of self-defense, but it's self-defense of our human condition."

For Loeb the answer is to get involved in a small way, helping to correct some injustice at a local level, but always to keep the big picture in mind, because real change has to be effected at a state or national level. But he knows too, that many Americans, nurtured on the ideal of rugged individualism and increasingly suspicious (with good reason) of big government resist anything that hints at a socialist government and so prefer the small gesture, helping through some private charity, giving time to a literacy class. "I tore up the section on what I'd call the relationship between social advocacy and volunteerism," Loeb admitted. "More than any other section of the book I rewrote it and I rewrote it because I wanted to get it right, because it's complicated. I really admire people who are out there on literacy program, or a Big Brother program, or a soup kitchen. They are doing a very good thing. But there's a guy named Greg Ricks who use to run CityYear here in Boston, who put it this way; he said, it's like there's kids being thrown in the water and you're trying to pull them out and there's more than you can ever pull out, and you have to pull them out, but you also have to find out what's happening upstream. Why do they keep falling in? Is someone pushing them in? is the bridge out? what's going on? And I think it's important to think of it like that. The wealthiest 1% has more wealth than the bottom 95%. As a percentage of their income they give less than people who have less money—they give more in total because they have more money, but they give less –and so what it really means is, a child's education, food, shelter, medical care is going to depend on the whim of somebody with money, and if they feel generous the child will get fed and if they don't feel generous the child won't get fed. And that seems terrible because this child has the right to get fed regardless of whether or not this person feels generous. So its' not to slight the efforts of the people who often don't have much money themselves and are trying to help fill the breach. Those are very honorable efforts. But at some point we need to talk about the larger picture.

"Sometimes I think that those of us who are social activists feel that if we just get the facts out then people will respond. And of course that's very important, but my experience is how they see themselves." Loeb said, polishing off the rest of his lunch before going off to settle on where he would be staying that night. "I look at my friend Hazel Wolf who's 101 years old, who I just heard speak on Earth Day two days ago in Seattle. She's inspiring. She helped fight for social security in the 30s when she was in her thirties and fought for labor union activism. More recently she's worked on environmental issues. She's says, Well, you do what you can and then you do some more. And I think, wouldn't it be nice for any of us to live lives like this woman, so that you can look back at 100 years old and really feel proud of what you've done. That you’ve participated and changed things."

Soul of a Citizen published by St. Martin's Griffin is available at most bookstores or through the Internet at www.soulofacitizen.org

War. What is it Good For? An Interview with Sayre P. Sheldon of WAND (Women's Action for New Directions)

It is a hot afternoon in June and the bombing in Kosovo has been ended for some weeks. Millions of US dollars were spent in the military campaign against the Serbs and millions of words were written about the role the US played in the war. At this point, the subject no longer claims daily headline space and most of us have gone back to fretting about our own, more immediate concerns. But Sayre P. Sheldon, president emeritus of WAND (Women's Action for New Directions) and its official representative to the UN, sitting in the organization's cramped Arlington offices, has not yet put the subject to rest.

Driving to the office she'd heard details on the radio of a new report claiming there are over 1 million homeless kids in America. Still thinking of Kosovo, Sheldon is reminded of the Eisenhower quote that every tank and plane built means a hungry child somewhere. Is this why the greatest military power in the world has the highest poverty level in the western world? . "Some of the missiles cost $340,000 a piece and we dropped 80 of them a day," Sheldon says, incredulity and dismay competing in her voice. "It's not that I don't feel we should help people in the world. Human rights apply to everyone. But we supported an air war that cost billions of dollars, and the money we used to destroy the infrastructure of the country and now the money we're going to have to use to put it back in, is going to have to come from domestic programs. The defense budget doesn't pay for actual fighting. It just pays for weapons and training soldiers. Why don't some of the people here who are homeless say, Wait a minute, do I have to go to Kosovo to get some money? This is a disgrace and it isn't even necessary."

WAND is, to use Sheldon's phrase, a "pragmatic" organization, meaning they are not against military action for defensive reasons but they are against military solutions to the world's problems. "Because A," Sheldon says, enumerating WAND's reasons with practiced ease, "military solutions cause terrible distress and disruption, and B, they cost a tremendous amount of money which everyone pays for, and C, they usually provide the seeds for another war."

Sitting at a table in the busy WAND office, Sheldon recounts an event that aptly conveys the distance between the government's priorities and WAND's. About a year and a half ago, WAND was holding its annual conference in Washington when a bill was being passed to fund 10 more B2 planes at a cost of $10m each. At the same time schools in Washington were closed because of their deteriorating conditions. As Sheldon describes it, "We took our umbrellas to the Capitol because they said that the plane couldn't fly in the rain. And that's partly true because it has a special skin that makes it invisible to radar supposedly, but rain can damage it. That image was so powerful: the schools couldn't be opened because they're in such bad shape but we could devote billions to this gorgeous but practically useless machine."

As WAND sees it, the US does not need to have the greatest arsenal in the world, depriving its citizens of so much else in the process, nor should it have to solve the world's problems alone. "I think our lack of interest in international solutions is very, very disturbing," Sheldon comments. "We have weakened the UN and now we blame it for not doing things. The idea of working with other countries is a very difficult one for this country."

This is not a good moment for WAND. When it formed in 1981, its acronym stood for Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament. If it had realized its original hopes it would no longer be in existence. Instead, as this century comes to a close, at least 30 wars are being fought around the world, wars in which civilians, not soldiers, suffer the greatest casualties; billions are being spent yearly on weapons of mass destruction; India and Pakistan, regularly at odds with each other, now have nuclear bombs, and enough nuclear missiles are still in place to extinguish life on earth. Given these circumstances, even peacetime is a kind of war, as Martha Gellhorn observed in "The Face of War": "We need not even make war; only by preparing, by playing with our new weapons, we poison the air, the water, the soil of our planet, damage the health of the living, and weaken the chances of the unborn."

Though the nuclear arms race between the US and Russia began in the 50s, it wasn't until the 80s that ordinary people began to protest against living in an atmosphere of destruction, questioning the role of the West in keeping the threat alive. It was in 1981 that Dr. Helen Caldicott, WAND's founder, an Australian pediatrician, gave up her promising medical career because she felt it was futile to save children only to offer them up to the threat of nuclear destruction. She decided instead to devote herself to promoting the idea of nuclear disarmament. Travelling the country, Caldicott found it was mostly women who came to listen to her. Out of their interest, WAND (then, Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament) was formed to educate women about issues they weren't traditionally given a say in. Caldicott made TV appearances with celebrities and helped give the young organization a profile, while Sheldon, already with a full-time career as an English professor at BU, became the organization's president. She was elected, she says deprecatingly, because she was the oldest one in the room at the time and the group of women were all very green about starting a national organization. But self-promotion wasn't what the organization was about. They were a group of women who wanted other women, in Sheldon's words, "to learn about military matters and how it affected their lives. The whole nuclear policy is so secretive and women tend not to be asked for their opinion when it comes to military matters, so we women organized to go to Congress and say you have to change this. Also, we wanted to alert ordinary Americans to the sense that we were coming close to some sort of nuclear disaster." Despite the fact that it was mostly women who expressed interest in Caldicott's message, WAND welcomes male members and neither Sheldon nor the organization support a theory that women are less violent then men. "Certainly women can be violent," Sheldon agrees, "but women are less innately socialized to go to war, and WAND's position is more that women have never had much to do with military policies and military budgets and so on, and that they should. They should have equal access to making these decisions."

With so little traditional input into war, it is ironic then that women have derived such benefits from war in this century. During World War I women enjoyed a new independence in industry and business, standing in for the men away at the front. They also endured the resentment of many men for bettering themselves by war and most were forced to return to the home when the war ended, but then World War II happened and women built on their previous gains and their liberation increased by further degrees.

Women and war is a subject Sheldon is familiar with in her other life as professor of English at Boston University. When we spoke, Her War Story: 20th Century Women Writing About War (Southern Illionois University Press), a collection of women's war writing Sheldon edited had just been published. The collection of writings by women covers the two world wars and the Vietnam war. Familiar names like Edith Wharton, Rebecca West, Colette, Toni Morrison and Grace Paley are present, along with many names not heard too often nowadays; Helen Zenna Smith and Louise Bogan among them.

"It's kind of like reading a history of the 20th century from a woman's point of view," Sheldon says about the collection. "And it's very moving because there are so many amazing things that women went through and wrote about."

The idea for the book came out of a course on war literature Sheldon began teaching at BU some years ago. In researching material for the course, she discovered that women weren't well represented in the usual anthologies of war writing, perhaps because, as she writes in her Introduction, "at a war or revolution's end, men usually reclaim both the power and the credit for what has happened."

"I had to work hard to find the material, dig it out of various places and put it together and by the time I had all the material the way I liked it, it was obvious it would have to be a book.

"I think one of the themes of my book is how much war changed women's lives. It went along in this century with women's rights. The two went hand and hand, but they didn't always work well together. For instance, the suffragettes in England were told to stop their campaign as world war broke out because it was disruptive, but then in the war many women developed skills and abilities. And women had to do so much of the picking up the pieces which I think is another theme of the book; that women kind of keep things going when men are at war."

The end of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race should in theory have meant the women of WAND could disband, and members like Sheldon could go back to concentrating full-time on their other activities. It was the new openness of the Gorbachev period and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Russia and not public outrage that ended the arms race, but Sheldon is proud of WAND's achievements during the Cold War years. "I think that WAND, along with some other groups across the country, really did make the public aware of the futility and the immorality of threatening extinction as a military policy. And I think we gave many women a feeling that they could do something about it, they could have a say in it. It wasn't off the chart for them."

But if the Soviet threat had ended, US military spending did not, befitting its new role of undisputed overlord of the world. So, except for a slight change of title, it was business as usual for WAND. With its acronym now standing for Women's Action for New Directions, its mission remained the same: "To change the priorities in this country from military ones to social and environmental ones."

But WAND also began to expand in new directions, working with women political candidates and women state legislatures around the country. "Women get into politics more to do things rather than to be a politician," Sheldon states, adding, "We have all this statistical proof that women vote differently and that there's a gap between how men vote and how women vote. I think it's because women are very aware of everyday needs and vote more for education, more for health, and so it seems when they get into politics they have strong commitments."

There are still too few female politicians to determine whether women would order things differently if they were given the chance. "Until you get 30 percent representation of women in any parliament or congress you don't get real change," Sheldon says. "You get awareness of so-called women's issues, because the women are there to keep talking about these things but you don't get the real change." And clearly not all women have a vision of the world that much different from men. Think of Margaret Thatcher, who as Prime Minister of England, initiated the Falklands War, or the 40,000 women who served in the Gulf War.

"We accept the idea that there will be a military, there will be struggles and that violence is a very real part of human nature but the stakes are now so high in a full-fledged war that we see it as a time when there's a real possibility that we can get rid of war."

Returning to the subject of America's 1m homeless children as we wind up our conversation, Sheldon says, "Years ago WAND chose the motto 'Children Ask the World of Us' and that's another connection I was making with the children living on the streets or in cars and in shelters. WAND makes the connections for women between buying going about their daily business and the policies decided at higher levels that we think are the wrong policies.

"It's been a terrible century. It really has," she says with weary conviction. "We've seen war go back to medieval methods. But I'm very hopeful about the growing acceptance of human rights and the idea that there is a basic level of living conditions that people are entitled to and I'm very encouraged by the women's movement and the strength of women."

Interview: Mystery Writer Robert B. Parker

Before Robert B. Parker created Spenser, his tough but charming private investigator, LA was the more usual locale of the gumshoe. But Parker showed that Boston and its environs can provide just as much murder and intrigue to keep the reader turning the page. Cambridge, where Parker resides in real life, gets plenty of play too. Susan Silverman, Spenser's long-time love (inspired by Parker's wife, Joan), lives on Linnaean Street, and, in Parker's latest, Hush Money, there's a reference to one of Harvard's Square's most familiar sounds, a Spare Change vender selling his papers.

Born in Springfield, Mass., Parker happily gave up his earlier career as a professor of English in 1979 after he had published five Spenser novels and knew he could earn a living from writing. The charismatic detective became even more popular when Spenser: For Hire came to TV in 1985 with Robert Urich in the lead role and ran for three seasons. Not all of Parker's 37 books are Spenser novels. Three Weeks in Spring, written in 1978, is a collaboration with his wife Joan about her battle with breast cancer. But the ageless Spenser, who has never been given a first name, remains Parker's greatest achievement. He's the perfect PI and the ideal man as well. He loves to cook, his dress code is casual but never thrown together, he's kind to animals, sensitive to women, and devoted to the love of his life, Susan Silverman.

Parker's writing style is unmistakable; it's clean, lean, and never beside the point. His interview style is the same. Read on for his succinct insight into the writer's world.

LB: What were your favorite books as a child and did they influence you in becoming a writer?
RBP: My father used to read to me when I was small: Winnie the Pooh, Uncle Remus, the frontier romances of Joseph Altscheuler, and I'm sure the fact of the reading, more than the particular books was nourishing.

LB: What sparked your interest in writing?
RBP: My interest in writing was sparked by my ability to do it, and probably, by the allure of a career that promised autonomy.

LB: How did you come to write your first Spenser novel? Had you tried other types of fiction before that?
RBP: I wrote the first Spenser novel as soon as I had time to. I need long hours of uninterrupted time. I had a wife and two children to support. So I quit work and went back to school and got a Ph.D. and got to be a professor, and then I had long hours of uninterrupted time. So I wrote The Godwulf Manuscript. It was my first effort.

LB: How do you come by your information about the murky underworld of crime and crime prevention? Do you have contacts in either world that you rely on for authenticity, or is the reality of crime wildly different from what we read about in private investigator novels?
RBP: These are works of the imagination, and if one has a good imagination, one can probably imagine a lot pretty accurately. I have spent much of my life (growing up around New Bedford, in the army, in gyms, playing ball) with guys who might under different circumstances become cops, or robbers. It's a matter of saying, in effect, "If I were a serial killer how would I feel?"

LB: Which of your books is your favorite and why?
RBP: My favorite book is All Our Yesterdays. I particularly liked the way the complicated point of view solved the problems of time management in it.

LB: What do you consider yourself: a mystery writer, a thriller writer, a suspense writer? Are these terms interchangeable?
RBP: The terms are not writers' terms, they are readers' terms, and marketers' terms. And as such there's nothing wrong with them. But they are of no use to me. I think of myself as a novelist.

LB: You completed Raymond Chandler's unfinished novel, Poodle Springs, and later wrote Perchance to Dream, a sequel to his first novel, The Big Sleep. That must have been a great honor, as much as it was a great tribute, to you, to take on the mantle of one of the masters of the genre. How did it come about?
RBP: The Chandler estate asked me to do it. My agent made the deal with them and with my publisher.

LB: The poet W.H. Auden said Chandler's work shouldn't be read as escapist fiction but as works of art. Are the Spenser novels meant to be read as rattling good yarns, or are they meant to reveal something to us about life?
RBP: I don't know. I am making the book I would like to read. I do believe that books need to be about something more than the plot.

LB: Gangsters in old novels, such as Chandler's, hardly seem threatening at all. Have we become so hardened to violence that contemporary writers have to up the ante to get a response?
RBP: I don't agree with the premise. Nor do I agree that the ante has necessarily been upped. So I guess you can put me down as "I don't know."

LB: How old is Spenser in the latest of your novels?
RBP: Ageless.

LB: Do you ever have the urge to kill Spenser off as Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes, or does the subsequent resurrection of Holmes act as a warning to all mystery writers not to fall into that trap?
RBP: I have no desire to kill Spenser off.

LB: When Spenser was the character in a TV series in the 80s, were you as bored by the process of making TV shows as Spenser is in Stardust (1990)?
RBP: Yes.

LB: Spenser loves food, likes to cook, dresses casually but is careful about how he puts his wardrobe together; he's got a great sense of humor, is sensitive to women, with a hound dog devotion to the love of his life, Susan Silverman. Sounds like the perfect man. How much of Spenser is you?
RBP: Some, not all. I prefer to think of his devotion to Susan as that of a poet, much like my devotion to Joan, my wife.

LB: While the rest of us are curled up with the latest Parker novel, what are you reading?
RBP: I just finished Jonathan Lear's book about Freud and philosophy, Open Minded. I'm now dipping into Harold Bloom's book on Shakespeare.

LB: Your literary epigrams suggest a wide reading. When does a writer choose an epigram? Is it during the course of writing a novel, when a line from something you are reading at that time seems appropriate? Or does supplying an epigram involve a search for something appropriate after the novel is completed?
RBP: The epigrams are discovered at various times, and are usually connected to thinking up the title. Which can happen before, afterwards, during, any time at all.

LB: Part of the pleasure of opening a new Parker novel is in reading the latest dedication to your wife. Is that your wife's favorite part of your novels?
RBP: Joan likes the dedications, though I hope she doesn't prefer them to the novel.

LB: What would you be if you weren't a writer?
RBP: Maybe a carpenter. Whatever it was I would be primarily Joan Parker's husband and the father of David Parker and Daniel Park

On the Rise

Fixing herself a cup of coffee, a pretty, dark-haired woman beams in response to the question of what it's like at On the Rise's Safe Haven for women at 1991 Mass. Ave., Porter Square. "It's great," she said, preferring that her name not be used. "I had nowhere else to go and they saved me. They listened to me."

The center is many different things to the 15 to 20 women who show up here in the course of a day. For some it’s a place to get clothes, food, a shower; it's a place where they'll get help making a doctor's appointment, or find someone to accompany them to a court appearance. Others seek assistance in tapping into housing services, or a detox program. But you don't have to be homeless to come here and there's no intake process. On The Rise is open to women with nowhere left to go.

"We do a lot of hanging out with women and the women dictate what they need," Katya Fels, the director of On the Rise, explained, sitting in her tiny office one bright January day. "There's a huge amount of strength and resiliency that allows someone to live homeless and I'm not particularly interested in telling someone who clearly has those resources how to run her life and what she should be doing….What we're trying to do is provide a place where a woman can start to work on some of the issues that got her where she is."

On the Rise was founded by Katya in 1995. She wanted to provide a new kind of shelter for homeless and abused women; not exactly a drop-in center and not a case management program, but a program that would treat women according to their needs. After a year of fund raising and planning, programming started in October 1996.

When Katya reveals her background—she was a teaching fellow in the chemistry department at Harvard—it elicits a predictably surprised response, which she politely dismisses, adding that she also worked with the Lutheran shelter in Harvard Square where she became a co-director and was involved with Response, a sexual violence hotline and drop-in center. It was while working at both these places that Katya began to see a correlation between women who were trauma survivors and women who were not getting what they needed from traditional providers. "It seemed obvious that if anytime a woman tries to take control over her life she gets hit, kicked, raped, or molested, it's hard for her to go through a program where they want to take control over her life. And so what I set out to do was to create an organization that would provide alternative services for this kind of woman—not to replace what's already out there, because what's already there works really well for a lot of people."

"I had the gift of desperation," Beatrice Tolbert told me by phone after Katya had supplied me with her name as someone willing to talk about her past and the changes that On the Rise helped bring about. "I needed somebody who could see something in me that I couldn't see in myself, and truly that came from On the Rise, and the strength and the hope that they gave me, when I didn't have either, also gave me the incentive to keep going on."

Beatrice had substance abuse and incest issues when she arrived at On the Rise in 1996. Like many women who come here, she had sought help from other sources. "I cannot say that those other places didn't help me. They helped me with what they could help me with, but I needed mental support. The strength of that support coming from On the Rise was just overwhelming."

With the help of Sue Tafrate, who has since left On the Rise to live in Washington DC, Beatrice went into a detox program, and then moved on to a halfway house. Now she lives in a three-quarter house and does volunteer work for Positive Directions, a support group for HIV sufferers. When I spoke to her she was preparing to go into hospital for surgery, but determined to stay cheerful.

"I had a whole lot of hurt and pain and the only way I knew how to deal with it was to drink and drug," Beatrice told me in between answering calls at Positive Directions. " It was hard for me to understand that life does have pain to it but when you get through the other side you see that you're a bit stronger than you used to be."

The most easily understood solution to homelessness is to provide housing, and homeless people know that if they want any kind of help, they should conform to expectation and ask for a place to live. But as Beatrice and others prove, a roof over your head may keep you dry but it won't necessarily solve the underlying problems in your life. Inevitably there's a high rate of recidivism in traditional programs, confirming for many the notion that the homeless are ingrates who'd rather leach off society.

"It's very hard to find housing, I'm not downplaying that," Katy said with emphasis. "We clearly need a lot more affordable housing but it can be incredibly isolating. A lot of women who have been homeless for a long time really feel that they are abandoning their friends by not allowing them to sleep on the floor, but the housed community doesn't want that. So unless you help to build up the person, how much meaning have you added to that person's life?

Since the program began, the center has steadily increased its hours. Now open 6 days a week, Sundays and evening hours will follow shortly. More hours mean more work for the staff of three outreach workers, a half-time development and operations assistant and a field ed. student who comes in one day a week and takes women out for trips to the movies or whatever they feel like doing. "The outreach workers are the key," Katya said. "The reason the program is successful is because they are incredible people who don't just see this as their job. They are really invested in the women and invested in making the organization work."

And on days when the center is short staffed, the women are always willing to help out with the vacuuming or washing the dishes; something Katya likes to encourage. She wants the women to feel " they really created this place from their voices and it's not going to work if they don't continue to take some responsibility for the success of the program."

Finding the money to keep going comes down to Katya's persistence. In the beginning it was difficult to find donors since what she was offering was a new model that hadn't been tested. With a proven track record (27 in permanent housing, 13 employed or in employment training programs, according to On the Rise's winter newsletter), nowadays donors are more willing to give. Needless to say, securing funding is one of Katya's jobs that never goes away.

Since last July, On the Rise has been receiving HUD funding, and this year they expect 20 percent of their funding will come from the government. "The truth is, I don't want a whole lot more from the government," Katya said with a wry smile, "because federal money restricts us in terms of who we can work with. It would mean that most of the women we work with now couldn't come here. One of the reasons we're really effective is because we do things differently and the women have a lot of say in how they use this program."

The biggest challenge now for Katya and her staff is realizing all their ambitions. There are plans for a transitional housing program. As with the center, it won't conform to traditional models so getting it right is going to take some work. "These are women who are in and out of hospitals, in and out of prison, and nobody wants to touch them, and some of them have turned around their lives and are just unrecognizable. A lot of them have taken very significant steps forward and achieved great milestones and I don't want to just throw together a transitional housing program. I want to make sure it really is what the women want it to be, and that's a lot of work, but that's where my heart is."