Arcade Publishing

Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad

admin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:28:00 +0000

Promised Virgins echoes of stories already told; they howl and yowl in your ear as Jeffrey Fleishman whispers and intimates, ever beseeching that you withstand his narrative a moment longer. Fleishman relies on the threads of past to weave his story, devices used before by film writers and the novelists who inspired them. Perhaps that is why the spirits bellow in your ear as you read; it is all too familiar, too ready to be seen as images flitting across a screen, even more so than it is to be read.

Begun like a tale of Arabian Nights, and threaded as such throughout, this story begins on the eve of a war. It is on the eve of U.S. involvement in Bosnia, when a woman and a man meet in darkness. It is a time when fates are still unraveling, and a mysterious bearded man bearing dates on a mule can upset the inertia and create jihad.

Told by Jay and from his point of view, this is the story not of him but of relationships–of his own and of those near him. Mostly, however, like so many other books, this is a story about a girl, Alija, and about the man who loves her, Jay.

Alija is an Albanian, a girl Jay found in a refugee camp who assumed the role of his translator. As Jay and Brian traipse across the country searching for the Dateman, Alija comes along searching for her missing brother. And as the conflict begins to assume stronger shades of religious strife, Jay queries, “What is it about spirituality and the unspoiled woman?” in response to himself as he imagines Vijay, a local reporter friend, would, that “temptation and virtue move through chaos,” as does Alija.

Alija, the central character, is not a promised virgin. She is spoiled, yet the narrative elevates her to the position of the only pristine character and a ready contrast is provided to the only other female character in the novel, Megan. Jay, sleeps with both; however, he only sleeps with Megan in the metaphoric sense. Megan is giving, a doctor who follows conflict and encounters its hardships in the worst ways while she is never a participant or a victim. First encountering her in this incarnation, Jay’s first remembers how she would cry during sex. While the others give of themselves willingly, Alija is taken. Alija, however, rarely cries.

Written by: Elisheva Zakheim, August 6th 2009

Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:55:00 +0000

By Billy Wayne Sinclair, Jodie Sinclair

Arcade Publishing

In 1965, Billy Wayne Sinclair accidentally killed a store clerk with a shot fired aimlessly into the dark after a robbery he had committed. One year later, at the age of twenty-one, he was sentenced to die in the electric chair for his crime, however unintentional. Sinclair initially dealt with his death sentence through denial, swallowing the tranquilizers the guards on death row dispensed to keep the inmates pacified. Thankfully, Sinclair became curious about the system that intended to kill him and the methods it had at its disposal to do so.

In 1972, the Supreme Court decided the case of Furman v. Georgia, effectively striking down the death penalty nationwide. Billy Wayne Sinclair’s sentence was commuted to life without parole. Over the next forty years that Sinclair spent in prison, he became a respected, award-winning writer and jailhouse lawyer. Since winning his freedom in 2006, Sinclair has established himself as a senior paralegal in a Houston law firm. Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor is Sinclair’s second book. The death penalty being the divisive issue that it is, it’s not likely that Capital Punishment will change many minds. The tales of miscarriages of justice, dirty politics, and DNA exonerations abounding throughout Sinclair’s book are enough to make one’s jaw drop in utter outrage. (Sinclair is fervently anti-death penalty, as might be inferred from past bitter experience.) However, that’s until Sinclair details the despicable crimes that led to the inmates’ death-row sentences in the first place, which generally caused me to lose any trace of pity I might have held. Perhaps Sinclair himself even realizes this, because the instances in which he actually discusses the crimes committed in a particular inmate’s case study are few and far between.

Sinclair is at his best when discussing in graphic detail America's present methods of executing condemned prisoners. Sinclair presents plenty of interesting anecdotes about the American way of death, past and present. For example, when Mary Surratt was hanged as a co-conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, several people held her legs so that her undergarments wouldn’t “immodestly” show in her death throes. The sight of a woman’s underwear was more shocking to the public than the sight of that same woman dying painfully and publicly.

Thanks to several victim-blaming statements early in the book, I was not terribly impressed with Billy Wayne Sinclair's gender sympathies. He regained some ground in a later chapter titled “The Killers of Women” in which he discusses the disparity in the sentences given to those who kill women versus those who kill "real" people. Men who kill women are almost a legal anomaly. Two-thirds of all violent incidents against women in the United States involve a relative or an intimate, and six times as many women are the victims of violence at the hands of intimate partners as by strangers. However, men who kill intimate female partners are rarely if ever charged with first-degree or even second-degree murder. Generally, they plea-bargain down to lesser charges such as manslaughter and can serve even less time than automobile thieves. Capital punishment is rarely handed down in cases involving intimate partner murders. Sinclair makes the compelling argument that the murdered women are not viewed as "crime victims," but simply as victims of "domestic violence." Domestic violence victims, says Sinclair, do not receive the societal benefit of the justice of capital punishment when they are killed by rejected lovers and husbands. Of course, it doesn't help that socially, historically, and legally, women have been viewed as the property of men, to be disposed of as seen fit by her owner.

Female perpetrators of crimes serious enough to warrant the death penalty are extraordinarily rare. As of January 1, 2008, women made up only 1.5 percent of the United States' death row population. Because of this anomaly, and because Sinclair focuses mostly on Texas and Louisiana in his research, and furthermore because of his prior focus on disparate gender issues, I expected Sinclair to bring up the famous case of Karla Faye Tucker's execution in Texas in 1998. However, it merits only a one-line mention in an appendix of statistics. Karla Faye Tucker would have beautifully illustrated the hypocrisy inherent in America's thirst for blood vengeance, so long as that blood comes from the wounds of the public's image of a lower-class black male perpetrator. Tucker, however, was an attractive white female who had converted to fervent Christianity while imprisoned on death row for a brutal ax murder, thus contradicting in almost every way possible the "ideal" capital punishment candidate. Many at the time called for leniency for Tucker, who also begged for her life, but then-governor George Bush would not grant a stay of execution. The lesson here, one may surmise, is that women are treated more delicately and with more sympathy as convicted murderers (out of quaint ideas about the infirmities and inherent passivity and pacifism of women) than they are as the victims of brutality.

I'd liked to have known more about Sinclair's own life on death row, and I did have a few quibbles with his editing and facts, but on the whole I found this to be an exhaustively researched and well-written book, and perhaps enlightening and inspiring to others who have found themselves back outside after years in the penal system. Those who are staunchly and unflinchingly on one side or the other of the capital punishment debate will not likely be swayed to change their position, but there are plenty of facts, case studies, statistics, and anecdotes to make the undecided and the fence-sitters fall to one side.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, July 20th 2009

The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:23:00 +0000

By Victor Malarek

Arcade Publishing

It’s impossible to study, be in, write about, or fight against _______ (you fill in the blank) sex work, prostitution, and sexual trafficking without getting some or all of it wrong. I’m not the only straight white guy to write about prostituted women, but without always acknowledging my privilege and standpoints reflexively. Like his 2003 book, The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, which looked at post-Soviet European bloc countries, Victor Malarek’s new work, The Johns, again demonstrates the ubiquity of sexual commerce and the obvious and banal evils that perpetuate it, but focuses this time on the demand and not the supply side.

Malarek is such a decorated writer, journalist, and television host that a film was made in 1998 about his career. He joins a long list of straight white males such as William Sanger, Geraldo Rivera, Nicholas Kristof, William Vollman, and Chris Hansen in claiming to care about sexual exploitation. Their back-patting is sometimes well deserved, and their usual contempt for heterosexual males involved in sexual commerce who are portly of body, doughy of complexion, and misogynous in their outlook is fully intact here.

And herein lies the irony. In seventeen chapters and 310 pages, johns are shown to be privileged qua heterosexual males, but so is the stealth journalist Malarek as he cruises Costa Rican bars and attends john reeducation camps. Serving up more platitudes and anecdotes than hard data, and more celebrity court cases than sociological insights, Malarek’s database consists of 16 interviews with johns (none explained), consultation of fifty-plus websites (none listed) and thousands of Internet chat room postings (ditto). He capably skewers the exaggeratedly masculine nature of such posters and postings, but that’s too easy. More difficult would be interviewing those long-haul truckers, policemen, clergy and U.N. “peacekeepers,” but that would require an accounting of his own privilege and standpoint.

I enjoyed the breakneck pace of Malarek’s narrative and appreciated that he interviewed so many anti-prostitution activists and researchers about the legalization question. Mentions of famous and infamous johns ranging from Hugh Grant, Hans Christian Anderson, and Eliot Spitzer to Charlie Sheen, Jimmy Swaggart and Clark Gable, and their easy rehabilitations will likely engage lots of non-academic readers. The chapter regarding johns arrested and diverted to First Offender Prostitution Programs started in San Francisco by the recently deceased Norma Hotaling, to whom Malarek dedicated the book, was a high point of the book.

Nevertheless, Malarek’s preference for sweeping generalizations is wearing, and the research he presents and references intratextually could fit on a plate. It flattens even the most obvious differences in prostitution’s many different labor forms and their different psychic costs, health risks, developmental precursors and economic motivators. His flat dismissals of the efforts of sex worker rights organizations rankled me, but the argument he makes for the criminalization only of buying sex and its facilitation is compelling, and I greatly appreciated his discussions of the Swedish, Australian, German and other country-wide experiments with legalization and decriminalization.

The Johns was designed to enable us to connect the dots, but Malarek leaves too many unaccounted for. It’s okay to sneer at the chubby, grubby bar patrons who are molesting pliant, brown-skinned girls and young women, but what if they’re thinking the same thing about him?

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., May 18th 2009