aw. RE: The Nobel Prize for War 2009 goes to ...

[Mark Kohut]

I know a couple people who know him (and his family) from when he worked in Nashville. They say he is a real good guy---I know this can be said of the public selves of many wing-nuts---but they mean it deeper. His sympathy
for racial justice, say, lived out in his actions, his writing. 

He struggled to support his family between some gigs and his dedication was spoken of--as well as his talent. 

A...and I read (much of) The Looming Tower and think it is superb. 

--- On Fri, 12/4/09, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: aw. RE: The Nobel Prize for War 2009 goes to ...
> To: "John Carvill" <johncarvill at gmail.com>
> Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Friday, December 4, 2009, 8:41 AM
> Actually, I'd never heard of The
> Looming Tower before posting that
> link from the Matthew Yglesias Blog (one of my staple
> political
> blogs).  So I really know nothing about Lawrence
> Wright.  So I Googled
> him.  His bio sounds not at all like the Wig-nut you
> describe:
> 
> http://www.lawrencewright.com/bio.html
> 
> Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and
> a staff
> writer for The New Yorker magazine.
> 
> He is a graduate of Tulane University, in New Orleans,
> Louisiana, and
> the American University in Cairo, where he taught English
> and received
> an M.A. in Applied Linguistics in 1969. Upon his return to
> the U.S. in
> 1971, Wright began his writing career at the Race Relations
> Reporter
> in Nashville, Tennessee. Two years later, he went to work
> for Southern
> Voices, a publication of the Southern Regional Council in
> Atlanta,
> Georgia, and began to freelance for various national
> magazines. In
> 1980, Wright returned to Texas to work for Texas Monthly.
> He also
> became a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In December,
> 1992, he
> joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he published a
> number of
> notable articles, which have won him the National Magazine
> Award for
> Reporting as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for
> Public Interest
> Magazine Journalism, and Overseas Press Club’s Ed
> Cunningham Award for
> best magazine reporting.
> 
> Wright is the co-writer (with Ed Zwick and Menno Meyjes) of
> The Siege,
> starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette
> Bening, which
> appeared in November 1998. He also wrote the script of the
> Showtime
> movie, Noriega: God's Favorite, directed by Roger
> Spottiswoode and
> starring Bob Hoskins, which aired in April 2000.
> 
> His history of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and
> the Road to
> 9/11 (Knopf, 2006) was published to immediate and
> widespread acclaim,
> spending eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list
> and being
> translated into twenty-five languages. It was nominated for
> the
> National Book Award and won the Lionel Gelber Award for
> nonfiction,
> the Los Angeles Times Award for History, the J. Anthony
> Lukas Book
> Prize, the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book
> Award for
> Excellence in Journalism, and the Pulitzer Prize for
> General
> Nonfiction.
> 
> In 2006, he premiered his one-man play, "My Trip to
> al-Qaeda," at The
> New Yorker Festival, and then enjoyed a sold-out six-week
> run at the
> Culture Project in Soho. It is now being made into a
> documentary film,
> directed by Alex Gibney, who won the 2008 Academy Award for
> Feature
> Documentary.
> 
> Wright has published six previous books. City Children,
> Country Summer
> (Scribner's, 1979), In the New World: Growing Up with
> America, 1960 -
> 1984 (Knopf, 1988), Saints & Sinners (Knopf, 1993),
> Remembering Satan
> (Knopf, 1994), Twins: Genes, Environment, and the Mystery
> of Identity
> (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997; Wiley & Sons, 1998),
> and God's Favorite
> (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
> 
> Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He
> also serves
> as the keyboard player in the Austin-based blues band, Who
> Do.
> 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 2:43 AM, John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I remember you mentioned The Looming Tower quite a
> while back. I looked it up, but isn't Wright a fairly
> right-wing guy, with a track record of slightly Islamaphobic
> views? I'm going from memory, but I think he co-wrote the
> screenplay for a dodgy Bruce Willis movie which contained
> some pretty unpleasant stereotyping of muslims?
>