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Defining Style

Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Religion & Spirituality

Bruce Feiler

Interview by Martin Brady

Bruce Feiler has been called the new George Plimpton. With his journalistic curiosity in tow, Feiler has managed to infiltrate unique areas of culture, emerging successfully with books that tell an insider’s story. In Learning to Bow, Feiler examined Japanese society; in Looking for Class, he profiled the learned atmosphere at Oxford and Cambridge; in Under the Big Top, he cavorted behind the scenes of a traveling circus. More recently, Feiler scored with Dreaming Out Loud, a look at the country music business.

Feiler’s latest, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses, is probably more scholarly in nature than his previous works, but certainly no less a testimony to accepting the journalistic challenge. Part travelogue, part religious history, part geological survey, part commentary on contemporary Mideast sociopolitical realities, Walking the Bible finds Feiler traipsing through the Holy Land, linking hard archaeological facts to the historic people and places found in the Old Testament’s first five books. From Jerusalem to Cairo, from the Red Sea to the Nile, from Mount Ararat to Mount Nebo, Feiler wends his way through some of the region’s political hot spots, interviewing pilgrims, immigrants, soldiers, farmers, priests and scholars, in his attempt to gain perspective on the spiritual dimensions of Moses’ Promised Land.

Yale graduate Feiler has, like many a good journalist, hung his hat in various places: Nashville, Washington, D.C., England, Japan and currently New York. "In 1997, I visited an old friend living in Jerusalem," Feiler says from his Manhattan apartment. "Her husband was teaching a group of high schoolers. When he pointed out that here is the rock where Abraham sacrificed Isaac, I said to myself, These are actual places? These abstractions are real? I decided to take the Bible this embodiment of old-fashioned knowledge and approach it with contemporary methods of learning, essentially plunging into it like any other world I had entered. As in my other books, I learned by doing."

Noah’s ark, the burning bush, the Ten Commandments these were the touchstones of Feiler’s geographic enlightenment. Key to this education were the various guides who helped him find his way through mountain, desert and military checkpoint. Not the least of these was Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren, a well-known man of scientific knowledge but also one whose recurring search for the Bible perfectly complemented Feiler’s own nascent fixation. Feiler grew up Jewish in Savannah, Georgia, claiming a strong religious identity, but no particular spirituality.

"I said over and over, when I started this project, that this was not about me and my religion or my God," he says. "This was supposed to be about me and the Bible. It did not take very long for me to realize that I was being self-protective. If I’d had a religious identity but had not been spiritual before, by the end of this journey, my experience made me more spiritual and less religious."

Besides offering observations on the current social climate of the region, Feiler makes a profound connection with the Bible’s stories, lands and characters. Says Feiler: "In the desert you are between being in extreme places, having extreme emotions, and opening yourself up to spiritual ideas that never existed before. That’s why the desert is such a powerful place. You’re pushed to the limits of your capacity and you crave nonhuman, nonrational support that is, God. That’s what Jews, Christians and Muslims all have in common: a single man goes out into the desert and has a transforming experience."

Feiler was also forced to deal with transformation as a journalist. In writing a lengthy volume that earnestly captures the Bible’s meaning, the author had to confront his usual methodology. "Before, I was writing about subcultures," says Feiler. "Here I was writing about culture itself. The stakes are a lot higher. In addition, it was a lot more emotional both researching the book and writing it. Finally, it was hard to be funny. I had been a circus clown, after all! To get the tone right, to be wide-eyed and naive and fun, was tricky. The Bible, after all, at its heart, is a great adventure story." But so, it turns out, is Walking the Bible.

Martin Brady is an editor, writer and critic. He lives in Nashville.

 

Bruce Feiler has been called the new George Plimpton. With his journalistic curiosity in tow, Feiler has managed to infiltrate unique areas of culture, emerging successfully with books that tell an insider's story. In Learning to Bow, Feiler examined Japanese society; in Looking for…

Memoir

Rick Bragg

Interview by Ellen Kanner

There’s just something about Southerners. "When they start telling a story, they roll with it," says Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, who has told a story or two himself. "Their sense of timing, drama, irony is just beautiful. They can tell you a story and you’ll be laughing so hard you’ll have to lie down on the carpet. It’s the same way with the sad stories, and the language is just prettier."

The happiness, the pain, the rich language and the soul of the South are alive in Bragg’s new book, Ava’s Man, a profile of the author’s maternal grandfather. It’s the natural follow-up to All Over but the Shoutin’, Bragg’s best-selling memoir of growing up poor in the Alabama hills, the son of an alcoholic father and a mother determined to provide for her kids. Many readers of Shoutin’ wanted to know how Bragg’s mother, Margaret, acquired her indomitable spirit. For Bragg, the answer was clear: Margaret’s spunk came from her father, Charlie Bundrum. But Bragg had one problem writing a book about this fascinating man — he never knew his grandfather. "He died in the spring of 1958, one year before I was born," the author writes. "I have never forgiven him for that."

Without Charlie to interview, Bragg mined his own family for the stories he tells in Ava’s Man. "We kind of built him up from dirt level," says the author, speaking from his home in New Orleans. "Physical description, personality, foibles and outright flaws, we put ’em all in there — much to my Aunt Gracie Juanita’s chagrin." Charlie as Bragg portrays him wasn’t perfect, just real — a moonshine-drinking, raw-boned man with big ears and a bigger heart.

As a New York Times reporter, Bragg interviews people for a living. However, in his research for Ava’s Man, he found that interviewing strangers is one thing; interviewing his own family was another story.

"It was nerve-wracking," he says. "These are your people. You don’t want to say anything that will cause them pain." He also discovered a downside to the Southern art of storytelling. "They’d get right to the good part" of a recollection about Charlie and a dog, "and then one of them would say, ‘You know I had a dog like that.’ The story will take a hard right turn and that turn will branch off like a roadmap. It can take three or four hours to steer your mom back to where they started. There were stories they started I still don’t know the end to."

But over time and over tales, Charlie came alive for the author, who recognizes much of his grandfather in himself, for good or for bad. "Charlie loved more than anything else on earth the curves in living," says Bragg. "He didn’t want a long straightaway, he loved the unexpected, and I do, too. That’s why I do what I do for a living. He had a terrible temper and mine is . . . I wouldn’t say legendary but it’s pretty damn well known. He wanted to tell you a story, and I sure do love to tell one. I hope when I open my mouth, a little bit of him pours out."

Though the two share storytelling skills, Bragg differs from Charlie in other ways. Charlie was a skilled carpenter; Bragg’s brothers have been known to laugh when he picks up a hammer. And though Bragg is proud he doesn’t own a suit, he has never had to endure hardship like Charlie, who kept his family going through the Depression.

A devoted father who loved his seven children, Charlie "did the things you have to do to keep them. He worked himself to the bone to give them everything he could. I’ll take risks. He took responsibilities." It is a choice that Bragg, single and childless at 41, may never face himself.

In writing Ava’s Man, Bragg preserves not only his grandfather, but the Southern storytelling tradition that pieced Charlie together for him. "You can’t assume storytelling stops at the county line, but I believe we have a richer tradition of storytelling," says Bragg. "It’s deeper and wider. You can’t walk down the street without hearing a good story."

That, he worries, may change. Popular culture and gentrification are robbing the South of all that makes it unique. "The deep South, the South I really know, is just as endangered as the rain forest. Accents become more bland, country music used to be Merle Haggard who’d gone to prison, Johnny Cash, who had a dark soul. Now these singers wear hip hop clothes and Versace. Faith Hill and Shania Twain are beautiful but about as country as Siegfried and Roy."

If All Over but the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man have made Bragg the poster boy of Southern storytelling, he enjoys using his reporting skills to show the world how the South really is. "People assume racism has some particular claim down here. I’ve lived all over the country, and there’s no line of demarcation. Some of the most miserably racist places I’ve been have had nothing to do with the South," says Bragg, who then waxes eloquent about grits.

He wrote most of Ava’s Man quickly, passionately. He stopped cold as he approached the ending, where Charlie dies. "I couldn’t kill him. I tried and I tried. I’d call my mother or her sisters, [and say] ‘Tell me something that can help me through this.’ But I just didn’t want to kill him," says Bragg. When he was able at last to reach the end, "I felt a sense of loss I’ve never had. I’m a reasonably tough man. I’ve been shot at and beat up, but this was awful."

To compensate, Bragg added "my favorite thing I’ve ever written in my life, about if he had lived five or six more years. I would have known everything. He would have taken me fishing, bought me candy. I’d have known what he looked like, what he sounded like, his mannerisms, how he stood."

He would have been able to ask Charlie the question that’s been bothering him. "I want to know what he was afraid of. He did not seem to be afraid of anything," says Bragg. "But I don’t think he would have answered me. I think he would have slapped me on the knee or back and would have started telling a story."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

Author photo by Marion Ettlinger.

There's just something about Southerners. "When they start telling a story, they roll with it," says Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, who has told a story or two himself. "Their sense of timing, drama, irony is just beautiful. They can tell…

NonfictionTrue Crime

Ann Rule

Interview by Edward Morris

True crime author Ann Rule gets to know the kind of people most of us hope we’ll never meet. The long-time chronicler of murders most foul is fascinated with the personalities of those who kill as a matter of choice.

Early in her career, the author got a close-up glimpse of one such frightening character. When Rule was just getting started as a crime writer in the early ’70s, she worked at a Seattle crisis clinic with the soon-to-be-revealed serial killer Ted Bundy. In the decades since that coincidental meeting, Rule has become America’s top true crime writer, with 16 best-selling books to her credit.

In her latest study, Every Breath You Take, she descends into the twisted mind of Allen Blackthorne, the handsome, brilliant and self-made (right down to renaming himself) multimillionaire who instigated the 1997 killing of his former wife, Sheila Bellush. After years of threats and terror, Sheila was shot and slashed to death in front of her two-year-old quadruplets. Blackthorne was convicted of her murder in July 2000 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

"I’m always looking for the protagonist who appears to have everything in the world," Rule said recently from her home in Washington state. "The rest of us think, boy, if I were handsome or pretty and smart and charming and wealthy and popular and had love, why wouldn’t I be happy? But these people never get enough. And, in the end, many of them will kill to get what they want. If I find the right person who looks good, but under that façade is basically evil, the book’s very easy to write. I just kind of follow along with the action."

But Rule doesn’t rely on action alone to propel her stories. She also delves into the family histories of her principal characters, trying to discover why they act as they do. "When I was a little kid and my grandpa was a sheriff in Michigan," Rule says, "I was allowed to go up in the cells and visit with the women prisoners. They just looked so nice. I was always asking my grandfather, ‘Why would they want to grow up and be a criminal?’ The why of murder always fascinates me so much more than the how. I wanted to understand the psychopathology, why some people would grow up to be criminals. I found that if you can follow the family pathology back, often there are clues."

With a degree of foreboding that is chilling to contemplate, the victim in Every Breath You Take chose Rule to be her voice from the grave long before she was murdered. "Kerry Bladhorn, who is Sheila Bellush’s sister, sent me an e-mail [in February 2000] and said, ‘I’m going to try one more time to find you.’ She told me that her sister, when she got divorced 10 years earlier from Allen, had said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, please have it investigated.’ And then she said, ‘Promise you’ll find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story.’"

Rule concedes that her book would have been derailed had Blackthorne been found not guilty. "It’s always a gamble for me," she explains, "because if someone is acquitted at trial — and I try to be at every session of the trial — I really could not write about it. They could say that I was invading their privacy."

Beyond the common trait of guilt, Rule says the criminals she writes about share other similarities: "I think the lack of empathy is the first thing. . . . All of them, I would say, have deeply entrenched personality disorders. In their minds, the world revolves around them, and the rest of us are one-dimensional paper-doll figures who are put on earth to make them happy. I don’t think they attribute the feelings to us that they have themselves. It doesn’t really matter who they hurt. Yet they’re all chameleons. They fool us. They give us back whatever we might want from them, if it suits their purposes."

Rule says her authoring chores have evolved into a fairly predictable pattern: "I’m always working on three

in a sense. I’m publicizing the book that’s done. I’m writing the book that’s in the hopper, and I’m doing a little advance research on the book to come. I don’t write on two books at a time. I may stop to do an article or two in the midst of a book, but I get so immersed with the characters involved that it’s awfully hard to pull me away."

Her next book will be about Anthony Pignataro, the plastic surgeon from Buffalo, New York, who poisoned his "faithful wife of 20 years," albeit not fatally. "It took her a very long time to even believe that this man she’d always stood beside would do that to her," Rule says. "I’m going to tell the story from her viewpoint."

Beyond telling good and true stories, Rule has a more basic agenda. "The thing I hope to do, although I know it’s impossible, is put myself out of business," she says. "I want to warn potential victims. Many of them are women, and many of them are battered women. It’s a cause for me. When I look back, though, so many of the books I’ve written are about wives who just couldn’t get away. But I’ve heard from probably a dozen or more women who’ve said, ‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for something I read in one of your books.’ That makes me feel so good."

Thanks to the public nature of trials and the media interest in them, even the most heinous killers get to tell their story. Rule believes their victims should be heard, too. "I always want to give the victim a voice," she concludes. "One of my main tasks is to let the reader know the extent of the loss and what might have been if this person had been allowed to live."

Edward Morris writes on books and music from Nashville.

True crime author Ann Rule gets to know the kind of people most of us hope we'll never meet. The long-time chronicler of murders most foul is fascinated with the personalities of those who kill as a matter of choice.

Early in her career,…

Cookbooks

Anthony Bourdain

Interview by Alden Mudge

Since the publication of his surprise bestseller, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain has become a kind of spokesperson and inspiration for the rowdy, subversive, slightly deranged subculture that inhabits the kitchens of many of the world’s great restaurants. Bourdain’s opinionated confessional exposed the goings-on behind the swinging doors of professional kitchens, with tales of sex, drugs, rock and roll and, of course, great food.

"People feel obliged to behave badly around me now," Bourdain says during a call to his home in New York, where he still works as the executive chef at the brasserie Les Halles. "People want to get me drunk and show me that their crews are at least as bad as mine."

By "people," Bourdain of course means his people—the chefs and line—cooks he imagined as his readers when he conceived of Kitchen Confidential and again when he decided to write his new book, A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal. "I was thinking of people like me, who hadn’t been too many places in the world and who might be interested to know what Vietnam smells like, what music is playing in the background, what’s cooking."

That Kitchen Confidential had an appeal that stretched far beyond the line cooks of the New York tri-state area still stuns Bourdain. It shouldn’t, for as he points out, he comes from "a long oral tradition in kitchens of storytelling and bullsh–ting. You know, amusing one’s fellow cooks with language."

The idea for A Cook’s Tour was for Bourdain to travel to exotic parts of the world on a kind of quixotic quest for the perfect meal. "I had unreasonable expectations. I’ve always had this attraction to Graham Greene characters, failed romantics shambling around the world in a dirty seersucker suit. I guess I’m not afraid to make myself look silly."

Silly or not, his publisher liked the idea. So did the Food Network. Which is strange, because Bourdain basically savaged the Food Network’s pretty and precious cooking programs in his earlier book. And he tweaks their noses again in A Cook’s Tour, the difference being that he is the host of 22 episodes on the Food Network, which begin airing in early January, and is therefore at the center of the ridiculousness. "They’ve certainly never had anything like it on the Food Network, he says. "There must have been a lot of hair pulling and misery at some of the stuff they saw. I’m reasonably proud of the show, but I didn’t want a TV career before and I don’t want one now."

For both the book and television, Bourdain traveled to Portugal, France, Spain, Morocco, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Russia, Great Britain and Mexico. He sampled the deadly puffer fish in Japan, ate lamb gonads with Bedouins in the desert, devoured haggis in Scotland, spooned up borscht in St. Petersburg, tried an inedible vegan meal in Berkeley and swooned over the meal of a lifetime at the French Laundry in the Napa Valley. He got too stoned in Fez to perform for television, took a harrowing trip among the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and found Vietnam and Vietnamese food uniformly remarkable, while reminding us that Ho Chi Minh worked for years in the professional kitchens of Paris and was a particular favorite of the great Escoffier.

Bourdain writes with vitality and a sort of antic humor about the people, places and food he is experiencing. And he is clearly not afraid to be opinionated. "When I was 12, Hunter Thompson was my hero, he says. "That kind of impassioned, deranged, first-person rant said to me, hey, I can actually write the way I think, and piss people off while I do it."

But A Cook’s Tour is more than storm and lightning. Bourdain arrives at a number of important insights about food. "The thing that stunned me the most was how good and how fresh so much food is in countries with almost no refrigeration. I was shocked by that. And humbled. Because people don’t have the luxury of refrigeration, preparing meals becomes a much more time-consuming project, which is societally not so bad. In Vietnam and Mexico I was struck by how food brought people together."

"Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself."

Alden Mudge, a writer in Oakland, California, has just returned from a trek to Mt. Everest base camp (or thereabouts) in Nepal.

Since the publication of his surprise bestseller, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain has become a kind of spokesperson and inspiration for the rowdy, subversive, slightly deranged subculture that inhabits the kitchens of many of the world's great restaurants. Bourdain's opinionated confessional exposed the goings-on behind the…

Nonfiction

Kent M. Keith

Interview by Lynn Green

More than 30 years ago, when he was an idealistic young college student, Kent M. Keith wrote a set of guidelines for achieving personal fulfillment. Like a pebble tossed into still water, Keith's Paradoxical Commandments launched a ripple that spread in ever-widening circles until it literally went around the world.

Unbeknownst to Keith, individuals and groups from the Boy Scouts to Mother Teresa began to embrace the commandments and pass them along to others. The arrival of the Internet speeded up the process and brought the commandments to the attention of even more people. His humble list of rules, first published in a Harvard student booklet in 1968, was quoted and praised worldwide, but in an ironic twist of fate, Keith was rarely credited as the author.

That situation is finally being corrected with the publication of Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments, which has already garnered Keith a six-figure advance from Putnam and a front-page article in The New York Times. In his new book, Keith devotes a chapter to each commandment and expounds on his theme of doing good in a crazy world with advice based on his own experiences and other real-life anecdotes. From his home in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he lives with his wife and three children, Keith recently answered questions for BookPage about the story behind his book and the remarkable staying power of his youthful creation.

 In the years after you wrote the commandments, when did you first become aware of their growing popularity?
For nearly 25 years, I wasn't aware that the Paradoxical Commandments were being shared throughout the world. But in the early '90s, news began to trickle in. The former Honolulu police chief heard them at a conference on the Mainland. Then a year later a librarian at my university found them on the Internet. A few months after that, a faculty member in my doctoral program handed them out as part of a packet of inspiring quotes that had meant a lot to her in her life. Then, in September 1997, I learned that the Paradoxical Commandments were on the wall at Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta. When I learned that, I decided to write a book about them.

I didn't know how widely the Paradoxical Commandments had spread until the summer of 2000, when I looked for them for the first time on the Internet. In two hours, I found them on 40 Web sites. That was something of a shock! I remember getting up from the computer and going for a walk, to think about what I had just discovered. By now, I have now found them on more than 90 Web sites. I am amazed at how many different organizations are using them Boy Scouts, Rotarians, churches, businesses, a homeless shelter, a welfare agency, Special Olympics, student leadership organizations and so forth.

Did it trouble you to discover that your own personal creation was being credited to others?
At first, it bothered me to find my work attributed to others. But when I learned that my work had been attributed to so many people, I began to realize what had happened. The Paradoxical Commandments were often attributed to people who just loved sharing them. When they shared them in a speech or article, other people attributed the commandments to them.

The fact that people want to share the commandments is, for me, the ultimate compliment.

You were just 19 when you wrote the commandments. How has your own view of the commandments changed since that time?
All 10 of the Paradoxical Command- ments still hold true for me personally. I have tried to live them every day since writing them in 1968. However, over the years my favorite commandments have changed. When I was 19, I especially liked the 6th, 7th and 10th commandments about thinking big, fighting for underdogs, and giving the world your best even if you get kicked in the teeth. Today, the 1st commandment is the most important to me people are illogical, unreasonable and self-centered; love them anyway. I think unconditional love is what holds families and friends and communities together, and we need much more of it in our world.

Since Sept. 11, many people have expressed a desire to find personal meaning in their lives. From your own experience, what's the best advice you can give them?
The best way to find meaning is to live the paradoxical life. The paradoxical life isn't focused on power, fame or wealth. It is focused on the meaning you get when you love others, do good, are honest, think big, fight for underdogs, build, help others and give the world the best you've got.

The first step in living the paradoxical life is to focus on others and become part of something bigger than yourself. I think that in most cultures, countries and centuries, people have discovered that loving and helping others gives them the greatest meaning in life. And joining a cause, becoming part of an organization or movement, or practicing a religion can give you the meaning that comes from working with others to accomplish something bigger than you can accomplish as an individual.

How can we keep from becoming cynical in this crazy world?
Cynics think the worst of people. It often strikes me that cynics are disappointed believers. They want to believe in people, but then become disappointed. Cynicism is the pose they adopt to cover their disappointment. We won't become cynics if we live our most cherished values, stay close to our families and friends and do our personal best. If we live that way, we will begin to notice others who live that way, and our sense of trust in human nature and people's motives our own and others' will grow.

 

More than 30 years ago, when he was an idealistic young college student, Kent M. Keith wrote a set of guidelines for achieving personal fulfillment. Like a pebble tossed into still water, Keith's Paradoxical Commandments launched a ripple that spread in ever-widening circles until it…

NonfictionPolitics

Bob Kerrey

Interview by Edward Morris

Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey says there is a very practical reason for ending his new autobiography, When I Was a Young Man in 1970, when he is only 26 years old and a fresh (and reluctant) recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“When I finished the longer version, it was almost 300,000 words,” he explains by phone from his office at New School University in New York. His whole life “was too big for one book. So I had to cut it down to size.” After being critically wounded in Vietnam in 1969, Kerrey returned to his native Nebraska and gradually immersed himself in business and politics. He served as governor of Nebraska and then moved on to two terms in the U.S. Senate. In 2001, he was appointed to his current post as president of the New School.

While Kerrey doesn’t regard himself as having been a “lone wolf” in his youth, the stories he tells reveal a personality which, while not indifferent to family and friends, seems extraordinarily self-contained. “If you ask me what’s the most important thing in my lifetime,” he reflects, “it’s the friends that I have and the love they give me male and female. And if you ask me what’s at the top of the list in terms of relationships, it’s the love of my wife and my children. I don’t know why I didn’t put more emphasis on that in my book.” Kerrey recalls his boyhood years in Lincoln, Nebraska, as idyllic. He worked in his father’s prosperous lumber and coal yard, had a newspaper route, became fascinated with his church, glued himself to the emerging medium of television, strove at high school football and developed a taste for politics via his participation in his YMCA’s model legislature program.

In national politics, Kerrey became known as a liberal on social matters. But in his youth he voted for conservatives Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. He says his political outlook has grown mostly from personal discoveries. “I went to Eastern Europe to Berlin and Prague and Russia in 1989 and 1990, when the revolutions were still going on [and] right after the [Berlin] Wall came down. Those experiences were shocking to me [seeing] the destructiveness of Communism. I saw how it destroyed the will of human beings and their potential and reduced their capability.” In his book, Kerrey confesses that he remained basically a provincial during his years as a pharmacy major at the University of Nebraska. He says he knew and cared little about art, literature or the grand social and political issues of the day. When he graduated in 1965, the war in Vietnam was intensifying, and he realized he was a prime candidate for the draft. Instead of seeking a deferment from military service, he bowed to the inevitable and, in 1966, enlisted in the Navy, enrolling in Officers Candidate School. His descriptions of his training at Newport, Rhode Island, and later at Coronado, California, crystallize those strange and dissonant times when America discovered it was at war not only with a foreign enemy but also with itself.

Last year, one of the soldiers he commanded the night he was wounded accused Kerrey of deliberately killing old men, women and children in the battle. Kerrey addresses that accusation only obliquely in his memoir, noting, “I would not swear that my memory [of the event] is 100% accurate. It is merely the best I can remember today.” In his interview, though, he admits he was “quite surprised” at the venom directed toward him because of this charge. “My guess is that it would be a different reaction if the story were to be told today, or if it had been told on October 1, 2001 rather than on May 1, 2001.” As a college president, Kerrey says one of his missions is to make sure the New School has an impact on the “great public debates of the day.” Is his passion for those great debates strong enough to lure him back into politics? “I don’t consider that I’ve left politics,” he snaps. “I love politics. I think democracy is very hard. It’s fun and enormously important. I’m not sure I’ll ever come back in as a candidate. I think it’s unlikely. But you never know.”

Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey says there is a very practical reason for ending his new autobiography, When I Was a Young Man in 1970, when he is only 26 years old and a fresh (and reluctant) recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

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