"Tolerance is love;
acceptance is a greater love still"
~Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Resources and Food for Thought

Nonfiction

• Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel is a pure delight as well as a beautiful book.
• Leaving the Fold by Jim Ure
• Beauty Bites Beast by Ellen Snortland
• Check out the titles from Gorgias Press. They specialize in books on things like the genocide of Syrian Christians during WWI, Iraqi folk tales, Christian minorities in Turkey, etc.
• The works of George Marsh Fredrickson (1934 to March, 2008).~ Hazel Rose Markus, Stanford professor, says his studies "should be required reading for anyone concerned with changing the world or creating a better one." They  include his Pulitzer Prize finalist and others:

• The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union
• The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny
• Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa and Racism: A Short History. 
• His most recent, published just before his death is Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race.

Recommended Recent Bestsellers (nonfiction)

• The Assault On Reason by Al Gore

•  God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

• Einstein by Walter Isaacson

• Buddha Is as Buddha Does by Lama Surya Das

• Beyond Tolerance (Viking, 2008) by Gustav Niebuhr Neibuhr says "Religion is to the 21st century what ideology was to the 20th."  He believes there is an need for a dialogue and acceptance between faiths because religion is a danger to the world, a danger as serious as the Cold War of the 20th Century. He also believes that, though much work needs to be done, there is an important shift in the air, one of cooperation and understanding between religions.

Fiction and Poetry

• Solo Novo: 2011 Wall Scrawls (Solo Press) includes literary work with a wall theme. Teachers and readers will find material here that can lead to thoughtful discussions on division. http://www.solopress.org  . Classroom discounts are offered.
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Kite Runner by Kaled Housseini
• This Is the Place by Carolyn Howard-Johnson

  "[Howard-Johnson's books are strengthened with behind-the-scenes details of Mormon life and history in a book suitable for all collections, particularly those where . . .
  Orson Scott Card's religious books are popular"
  ~ Library Journal

• First the Raven by Leora Krygier
• One Sister's Song by Karen DeGroot Carter
  One Sister's SongAudrey Conarroe, a biracial woman, never planned to move back to her small, predominantly white, hometown in western New York. But when she was named guardian to her teenage nephew, she had no choice but to do just that. Eight months later, Audrey prepares to sell her sister’s old farmhouse when a series of discoveries forces her to rethink everything she’s ever assumed about love, race, and respect.
  
  One Sister's Song explores challenges faced by individuals and families of mixed-race heritage as well as single parenting, grief recovery, and the Underground Railroad.
   

• Boy's Pond by Warren Stucki, M.D.
  "BOY'S POND was first published in 2002, yet six years later interest remains strong. Set it St. George, Utah, ts themes are timeless. It is a multi-layered story that explores the ramifications of the Yucca Flats radiation fallout and sickness that ensued; government lies and cover up; early death and conventional religion impotence in explaining this tragedy as well as religious and native American prejudice. A classic and well worth the read."

Fiction for Children

Red in the Flower Bed, a picture book by Andrea Nepa, fills a special niche in helping children understand interracial adoption. A review by Katie Hines of this fantastic book is available at http://katiehines.blogspot.com/2009_03_15_archive.html

A Purrfect Love by D. K. Abbott. Most of us feel different in one way or another. Here's a little book for preschool children about a kitty who is a different color from his siblings and makes a very unkitty like sound when he mews. It is sure to teach youngsters (subtly, of course!) acceptance--of others and of themselves. I give it five stars for content. I also liked the illustrations. They were, well...gentle. Perfect for the subject matter.http://www.amazon.com/Purrfect-Love-D-K-Abbott/dp/1450543472/

 

Fiction Depicting the Repression of Women

• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Kaled Hosseini

• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

• Peony in Love by Lisa See

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

• Don't You Marry the Mormon Boys by Janet Kay Jensen. "A light mystery-romance set with a polygamist cult background. Insight and sensitivity. Sound research."

Articles

• "Intolerance Is Scary Halloween Proposition" by Walter Brasch, author, columnist and journalism professor.
• "Racism and the American Media" (illegal immigrants) (column) by Walter Brasch, author, columnist and journalism professor.
• The study guide in This Is the Place.   ~  Rebecca Brown of  RebeccasReads.com said, "At the end [of This Is the Place]  there is a Reading Group Guide of questions for serious discussion, which transforms this novel into a textbook about closed societies & their impact."
• Click here Carolyn's first person essay, "Beating Time at Its Own Game," that explores age and gender discrimination.
• Carolyn wrote an essay on her experience at the death camp Terezin after she traveled to the Czech Republic to study and dug it up from her files in February of 2007 after 60 Minutes aired a segment  (January, 2007) on camp.  Scroll down a bit on this page.
• For more of Carolyn Howard-Johnson's essays, poems, and other work on subjects related to war, peace, tolerance, and acceptance visit her "Back to Literature" column on MyShelf.com (where old columns are archived) , or check out her books This Is the Place, Harkening, Tracings and the foreword in the book Support Our Troops: Quotations on Patriotism and Prayer (published by Andrews McMeel).

Videos/VHFs/DVDs/

Although Jahangir Golestan-Parast's primary purpose is to forge acceptance and understanding between the peoples of Iran and America, his work also covers important events like the 6.6 earthquake that devastate Bam. So in addition to the video on Iran, you may also want to look up Bam 6.6, on his site. Golestan-Parast's motto is "Humanity Has No Borders."

List of Peace and Tolerance Museums

Websites

Andrew Carnegie's Endowment for International Peace seeks to end wars.
For opinions on a naturalistic worldview; an introduction to the brights.
Facing History and Ourselves works to increase understanding between peoples.
United planet holds a contest for poetry that promotes cross-cultural understanding.

Blogs

Anti-Bias Programs

• The Miller Early Childhood Initiative sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League.

• Temple Israel's (Hollywood) A World of Difference Institute.

• Santa Ana Unified School District's Kinder Readiness Program  

• Second Annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity In American Higher Education.

Movies

God's Army earned a cult following, both Mormon and Non Mormon for its balanced portrayal of the LDS missionary experience. My husband, Lance Johnson,  plays the coffee mug guy in this movie. Available on DVD.

Skin is not about sex as one might imagine but about the horrors and inhumanity that are the result of intolerance. A fine independent film, poignant and--in spite of its theme--full of love. A portrait of what it means to be fully human.

The Help is both a novel and film. I expect it to be an Academy Award nominee in 2011.

Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood. Courage, inspiration, tolerance, forgiveness coupled with a great story.

Undertow. About tolerance. Violation. Redemption. Search it out. Spanish with Eng subtitles. A Ten.

Even the Rain. About tolerance, friendship, caring and the importance of our art. Spanish with English subtitles. Nine of Ten.

In Darkness is an amazing depiction of mankind's inhumanity to man, based on a true story. It was inspired by the book In the Sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall. This film is one to study for near-perfect screenplay construction (and, by default, novel construction).

Plays

Watch for them in your hometown

• Missionary Position, written and performed by Steven Fales may be on its way to Broadway soon.

• Confessions of a Mormon Boy by Steven Fales.

• Stormy Weather, conceived and written by Sharleen Cooper Cohen. The life of Lena Horne. Very long but rated excellent. Watch for it in your home town.

• A Los Angeles theatre often features work that celebrates tolerance, is Celebration Theatre.

• The Sierra Made Playhouse is featured The Foreigner by Larry Shue. If you didn't get to see the production directed by Stan Kelly, watch for it elsewhere. A pure Downsouth spoof on the klan. Sometimes intolerance is better tackled with humor.  626 355 4318.

• Stoop Stories by Dael Olandersmith closed at LA's Center Theatre Group, the Kirk Douglas Theatre. When it comes to your town, hope you'll consider seeing it. She is a veritable story-telling storm and her acting is just as good. She also wrote Bones.

Insight and Understanding
into
Utah, Its Religion, and Culture

Books

• Leaving the Fold by Jim Ure

• Sister Wife by Natalie Collins

• Don't You Marry the Mormon Boys by Janet Kay Jensen. Find my review of this book.

• Of course, my This Is the Place and Harkening and, yes, even Tracings.

• Mormon America by Richard Ostling and Joan K. Ostling (Harpers). ISBN 0061432954)

A little Utah Memory

Carolyn and very long time Utah friend, Karen Bryner, in Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah.
On the left we are in front of the old Brighton general store. It's been around since I learned to ski.
Right, Karen and I  watching moose. Ahem, the moose is center, just in case you have never seen a moose in Utah.
He was watching us watch him.  February, 2008.

Quotations
That Unfortunately Prove That Intolerance is Still Alive and Corrosive

Time Magazine, August, 2007: Michelle Obama, wife of Barack Obama is addressing her husband's biracial credentials at a Women for Obama event on Chicago's South Side. It was predominantly an audience of black women.

"We're still playing around with the question, Is he black enough? Stop that nonsense." 

Won't it be nice when we don't have to address color at all?

------

Time Magazine: August 2007: I. A. Rehman, a human-rights activist from Pakistan, addresses the relations between India and his country:

"We must learn to be good neighbors. And I'm optimistic. People cannot be foolish forever."

---------

Time Magazine: August, 2007: Vice president of soccer's international governing body, Jack Warner, in a statement that he will block an English Bid to host the Soccer World Cup of 2008:

"Nobody in Europe likes England. England invented the sport but has never made any impact on world football."

-------

Time Magazine, August, 2007: "Eight years after the U.S. and its NATO allies went to war to stop former Yogoslav President Slobodan Milosovic's ethnic-cleansing campaign in Kosovo, efforts to integrate the province's two ethnic communities have produced disappointing results."

The War Museum at Oslo

(From Tracings.  Finalist in performance in Norwegian Cruise Lines Star Search.
Available for reprint at no charge with permission from the author.)

 By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Raindrops surf my windshield, slip across my reflection, tears

not fettered by gravity. I look into my father’s face, decades gone,

rather than my own. Years later I search for family

seeds. Norway’s fjords shed salty droplets

on faces like my father’s. Round faces. Eyes dilute-blue

like the pale skies above them. Men who fought

as Churchill’s voice crackled through smuggled vacuum

tubes. Here miniature battles, cotton snow, charcoal

clouds, tiny lead replicas of soldiers now gone, desperate

photo-faces of the condemned. Only days before I reached this spur,

I saw my grandson off to war, alone. A sacrifice.

A trade. For my father who never marched. Travis’ face

flat, pasted behind a window, an upside down smiley

pattern behind windows tinted khaki, his bus taking

him away from me. I leave the dark halls, history

encased, to sit outside fortress walls, put my head

between my knees. Gasp for comfort. Fragile. A portrait

on my bureau at home. Acidglass shores up the image

murlled by time. My father, stands in sepia snow,

round face, eyes look beyond the frame at me. He wouldn’t know

these boys his age, his blood, resisting Hitler’s hand

raised, his arms against them. Oceans, bodies of land

between my father and these others. Here a disconnect,

a link I cannot touch or breathe. Once I was a child

who did not have to say goodbye, now a grandmother

who must pay the price. My grandson. Heads for heat

and oil and sand. He, too, resists. He, however,

unsure, doesn’t know quite why or who or what.

This Nordic rain does not, cannot wash

the memory or the present clean or clear.

Copyright© Carolyn Howard-Johnson 2007.

Taking a Dose of What’s Good For You

Ever Heard of Terezin?

(Available for reprint at no charge with permission from the author.
Learn more about Terezin from DVDs produced by 60 minutes; available on Amazon.)

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

It was the side trip no one talked about. And then everyone did. Some were interested. Some were afraid. No one was enthusiastic.

"It will be good for the younger students. You know…to learn what we remember," one of we more mature students enrolled in the Glendale College Summer Studies Program in Prague said. We nodded solemnly. In the end we all—young and old--went to Terezin because we felt we must.

This was not a death camp in the strictest definition of the word. It was a camp where people were "retained" before they were sent on to Auschwitz or one of the others where there were facilities for mass destruction. Still there were ovens to cremate those who died of mistreatment or starvation or overwork or natural causes. It was no wonder there was some reticence among us.

Our tour guide was Michal. She was from Israel and spoke so many languages I lost count. Perhaps in her late 20’s, with curly dark hair and dark eyes that sometimes reflected generational pain, she had come to Prague at the suggestion of one of her professors in Israel. "My wish for you is that one of you will find unique blessings of Prague," he had told her. She was searching for a place to practice her arts. She was a puppeteer, a performance art enjoyed by many Czechs. She was also a writer. Sometimes, as an avocation, she led tours to Terezin because she wanted others to learn from its history. Her grandmother had perished there.

When I first saw her she was sitting on one of the stairs among students piled on the stairs with their daypacks. She wore a long black dress with huge yellow hibiscus printed on it. Black for mourning? Yellow for hope? I was busy with a journal, one of the assignments for writing class I was taking at Prague’s Charles University.

"Are you a writer?" she said. I noticed later that she managed to ask every one of her charges a personal question about themselves, welcoming them with her soft accent. She invited me to a poetry reading for later that week. "It’s in a cellar. Just like you think of when you think of Bohemians."

I told her that I only write in English. "Prague is for everyone," she said. "So is Terezin."

And she was right. From the bus we could see fields unfurled like flags of orange and yellow. Poppies, sunflowers, mustard weed. We were travelling Northwest from Prague and wouldn’t be too far from Dresden when we arrived. Berlin was beyond that. We would be in the Sudentenland, the Czech lands where most spoke German. They were given over to Hitler without a shot fired.

There was a fortress on the right. Graves with poppies carefully placed at the headstones. Past the Ohre river. Into a village. A museum where we saw the stuff of life—sewing projects, drawings, music, even plays—works of art done by those held in the camp. There was a wall in the museum that had been frescoed into a permanent display with the images of official lists of human cargo the trains held. They were like human ghosts on bills of lading.

Michal read one name. It was that of a child, born the same day and month I was. I was overwhelmed and did what writer’s do. The journal I was to keep for my creative writing class came in handy:

Terezin Fresco

Crystal memories
Fragmented shards
Cleansed scraps
Congealed into
Stucco tears.
LÖWNER THOMAS
Child of terror
Born in April
Like me.
On the fourth
Like me.
1935
I am 60.
He is never.

When I finished writing, my group had disappeared. I wandered the streets of the little town searching for them. It was extremely hot (one of the few hot days in the entire month we were there) and there was hardly anyone about. Finally I gave up my quest, exhausted. I sat in a town square next to an old woman who was crocheting.

"Was tust du?" I said in the familiar of German, because I couldn’t remember the formal.

 She didn’t seem to mind my impertinence. She took out piles of doilies from a basket and told me she made them to sell. She also discovered that I was "lost" and found someone who led me back to my group. I decided that, though it was good to be back with them, I was meant to have had this idle time sitting with an old lady on a shady park bench. It was a view of a town with a horrible past that somehow goes on living in the present.

We went on to another memorial where trees "give a beautiful shadow," as Michal worded it. A place too beautiful for a massacre.

This memorial had been placed at Terezin by a newer generation of Israelis. They had noticed that their generation has been deprived of aunts and uncles for they were all dead. They also became aware that they never saw anyone wearing boots because the memories of boots were still too vivid. There were no dogs, either. Watchdogs had not been their friends. The scars were still evident, two and three generations later. A memorial would help us all to remember.

So, in honor of Michal, I will not dwell on the morgue or the ovens but on hope for a better future. A better future ensured if we visit Terezin, in person or in print. The student who said this visit would be good for the younger students was wrong. It was good for all of us. This was a place of horror. But it was also a monument to the strength of spirit, both of those who died and those who survived and those who still make a life there. Those of us who visit history may choose to do things differently in the future. We may respect life, the way those Jews and Gypsies and Intellectuals and Homosexuals did, even in the face of death.

Copyright© Carolyn Howard-Johnson 2007

On the Holocaust

Buy Links for Carolyn's Books

Great Fiction
Purchase THIS IS THE PLACE
and HARKENING at Amazon.

Great Poetry
Purchase TRACINGS (Finishing Line Press) at Amazon.

Give the gift of poetry with a chapbook
from Magdalena Ball's and My
Celebration Series
CHERISHED PULSE: Unconventional Love Poetry
IMAGINING THE FUTURE: Ruminations on Fathers and Other Masculine Apparitions
SHE WORE EMERALD THEN: Reflections on Motherhood
BLOOMING RED: Christmas Poetry for the Rational
DEEPER INTO THE POND: A Celebration of Femininity

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 "Careers that are not fed die as readily
as any living organism given no sustenance." 
~ Carolyn Howard-Johnson

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A book that may interest you is Support Our Troops by Eric Dinyer. It is merely a little giftbook of patriotic sayings that comes complete with a magnet ribbon for your fridge or car. Carolyn wrote the foreword for it. A percentage of proceeds go to support Fischer House, a Ronald McDonald House kind of charity where families of wounded troops may stay at no charge. Published by Andrews-McMeel.

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