I became interested in oral history after encountering Studs Terkel’s Working and the early works of Svetlana Alexievich and even Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which could be read as the most entertaining fictional oral history ever. My book New Yorkers is a portrait of the city featuring nearly 80 real narrators. Each voice is part of a chorus that, I hope, will reflect the vitality and resilience of the place.

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Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time
(Random House Trade)

When I read her books, I marvel at how Svetlana Alexievich is both there and not there, never overbearing but present in outline in her encounters as she introduces a span of Russian voices that brings me—a resident of the west—into the memories and even the textures of the last days of the USSR. I go back to this book whenever I’m curious why is Russia the way it is. It’s all there in Secondhand Time—not just the recent past but intimations of what the country will become. In awarding her the 2015 Nobel prize the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said that Alexievich’s work amounts to ”a history of emotions—a history of the soul, if you wish.“ The great lesson from Alexievich is that if this history is to be soulful, its language cannot come from those who are paid to think, paid to speak, whose words are dulled by any sort of PR officialspeak.

For anyone writing oral history, this official language is death. It’s not language at all. Alexievich knows how to sit with her interviewees and appreciate that they may be strange, morose, reticent, but ultimately willing to offer a version of their story that hasn’t been drained of life. The encounters are intimate. I can almost smell the kitchens where these conversations take place and throughout the text Alexievich is alive to the pauses, the recalcitrance of human encounters. ”She falls silent“ is a phrase repeated over and over. I love Secondhand Time for the moments when Alexievich’s presence is fully revealed. She steps into the scene. The journalist merges, even just for a moment, with the subject. At the end of a particularly brutal and moving section in which an Armenian refugee offers up an account of a pogrom, Alexievich concludes with the italics: [And both of us cry].

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield
(New York Review of Books)

I know this book inside and out. I know its cramped typesetting and I’ve nearly memorized the intro in which the great English writer Ronald Blythe describes his interviewing project, which unfolded in 1966-67 and was published in ’69. Perhaps because I wrote a follow-up of sorts in 2006 I know the flatlands and hollowlands of the villages in East Anglia where Blythe conducted his interviews with farmers, orchard workers, thatchers and saddlers. (This was all long before I showed up in the era of commuters, gravel drives and gourmet pub lunches.) Blythe’s eloquent introduction features one tell-tale line: ”The book is more the work of a poet than a trained historian“—which is probably why he is alive to all the chewy language of the region, all that Suffolk voice, with its peculiarities and phrasings that occasionally seems to be plucked straight from the old testament.

While working on my own book, Return to Akenfield, I heard some of those old voices in council homes in the village, including when I visited an ancient rag rug picker. In 1966 Blythe’s interviewees reflected on the great industrial changes of the early 20th and even late 19th centuries. There are plenty of high points in his epic, but I always love the way the book ends, with the gravedigger, ”Tender“ Russ, whose two budgies, Boy and Girl, drown out any bad news that comes across on the radio. ”Dust to dust they say, It makes me laugh,“ Russ says. This is Suffolk. ”Mud to mud, more like.“ Russ tells Blythe he wants to be cremated. ”Straight from the flames to the winds, and let that be that.“

Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Edie: An American Biography
(Grove Press)

Stein worked with Plimpton to produce an oral history that was ostensibly about the actress and fashion model Edie Sedgwick. It must be. She’s there in the title. She peers out from the cover of my edition. But the brilliance of the book is in its structure and the way Edie swerves away from Edie. Sedgwick ”touched so many worlds,“ Stein once said in an interview, ”These different, alienated worlds in the 1960s—and the story is as much about all of those people as it is about her.“ Words like ”tapestry“ and ”chorus“ often get thrown around in discussions of these voice-driven books, but Edie is truly orchestral. Stein used Sedgwick’s brief life to investigate both the main players and peripheral figures of the Pop art scene in New York, as well as a whole cast that connects to Sedgwick’s patrician New England roots. The resulting book allows for a surprising variety of tone, and ends up an account of an entire era giving way to the next. All the while the narrative moves toward and away and around the tragic, wide-eyed figure at its centre.

Studs Terkel, Hard Times
(New Press)

Certain images linger from Hard Times, Terkel’s sprawling account of the Great Depression. A man who worked the San Francisco waterfront describes the scene when four jobs were offered to a crowd of hungry workers:—“a thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs” over them. I return to Hard Times for its imagery and its range. Terkel created a masterpiece out of dogged legwork. He got there, he tracked down the voices, including those who could provide expert testimony on dust bowl poverty and White House policy. He moves from the accounts of social activists to men riding boxcars. Each time I return to the book with more respect for the rich trove of personal details that might have been lost in the work of other historians. Terkel found fit to gather the quirks of speech and images a person carries with her—the stuff that wouldn’t show up in a polite obituary. And none of it feels like medicine. Terkel entertains throughout. You can tell he’s a collegial interviewer and I love knowing he criss-crossed the US with a clunky recorder. Much of the work that goes into oral histories remains off-screen. How does a writer set the stage to encourage his subject’s eloquence? Studs listened with respect and enthusiasm, and he passed to his readers a sense of discovery. Don’t tell us too much. Let character emerge from cadence, language, word choice. Let a person emerge in her own words.

Tony Parker, People of Providence
(Eland)

I wrote a book about London. Tony Parker was smarter. Instead of the whole city, he chose one housing estate south of the river and spent about eighteen months in the early 80s hanging around and listening to the thoughts of its residents—and you can sense, in each interview, how that time was spent building trust and familiarizing himself with individuals who then gave him, piece by piece, a collage of urban life. The book burbles along—there’s no other word for it—and part of the pleasure is following the flow of London language. The issues of Providence are revealed, including accounts of racism, classism, and the slog of poverty, but Parker is so patient with his interviewees that the large themes end up embedded in the living world of Providence with all its rich details. What I admire about the book is how deep Parker sinks into one setting. Writing about an entire city means a lot of movement, a lot of territory to cover. Parker finds in one tower block an entire world. Travel writing, he reminds us, doesn’t mean straying far.

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New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor is available now via W.W. Norton and Company.

Welcome to Lit Century: 100 Years, 100 Books. Combining literary analysis with an in-depth look at historical context, host Catherine Nichols chooses one book for each year of the 20th century, and—along with special guests—takes a deep dive into a hundred years of literature.

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In this episode, Catherine Nichols discusses Svetlana Alexeivich’s 1985 oral history The Unwomanly Face of War with author Megan Buskey. The conversation covers the ways World War II is remembered in Russia versus in the United States, the feminism of the 1970s that created an audience for a book of this kind—and the topics it can’t cover—as well as ways that the experiences of Soviet soldiers in World War II can shed light on the current war in Ukraine.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! 

From the conversation:

Catherine Nichols: She’s definitely an insightful listener to these stories. To the extent that she’s shaping the stories or that she’s just listening, you definitely have a feeling of—I feel like I know what it would be like to be in a room with her. It might be false, but I think at the end of the book, I had a feeling. You know what it was? It was partly a feeling of optimism about the project itself.

There’s something kind of optimistic about the idea that unsayable things could be said—and that the world was ready to hear things—that has things in common with feminism in the 1970s in other parts of the world also. The idea that if you can just say things clearly, if you can just say what has been unsaid for so long, then that alone is powerful enough to change things and to improve people’s lives. There’s something very hopeful about the project, even if it’s also devastating to read.

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Megan Buskey is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family History of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023). A former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, she has been traveling to and studying the former Soviet Union for 20 years. She has written for The Atlantic, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications.

Catherine Nichols is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in many places, including Jezebel, Aeon, and Electric Literature. She lives in Brooklyn.

To have your work compared to a monumental literary title is always an honor and a burden to a writer. My debut novel, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster is often described as a historical novel similar to Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. Like Pachinko, my novel is a story of a Korean family surviving the turbulence of the 20th century, the most dramatic period of modern Korean history. But some of the early readers of my novel, especially those who read it mainly with Pachinko in mind, voiced a complaint that 8 Lives is at times too dark and too devastating to read.

If it were up to me to name one book that was the most influential for 8 Lives, I would choose The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich rather than Pachinko. I came across this groundbreaking work of literature about six years ago when I was just beginning to develop ideas for my debut novel, and it upended my literary world in the best way possible.

Only a half hour after I first opened the book in the University of Hong Kong library, I found myself crying uncontrollably despite the spectators in the room. I’ve never shed so many tears reading a book. The Unwomanly Face of War, an innovative work of literary nonfiction by the Nobel-prize-winning Belarusian journalist, features hundreds of different voices of women from the former Soviet Union, who narrate their pained personal accounts of fighting in the Second World War. This oral history portrays a vast range of human emotions in their full intensities and subtleties, through the raw languages of numerous women who are the firsthand witnesses and survivors of the war’s brutality.

I was surprised by how similar many of their stories were to those of my family I had grown up listening to, the testimonies of war and its ongoing aftermath. The story of rapes committed by Soviet soldiers reminded me of my grandmother’s account of witnessing and narrowly escaping rapes by American soldiers during the Korean War; the landmine accident that took the life of a Russian soldier in his hometown, after surviving years of war, resembled the one that took my grandfather’s leg two decades after the war was over; stories of townspeople killing each other, divided by the conflicting politics of the Germans and the Communist partisans, were identical to those of my grandparents, split by the violent confrontation between Communist guerrillas and the Allied Forces; the hunger the Soviets suffered, during and after the war, was akin to that of my great-aunt who survived a famine in North Korea that wiped out one-third of her region’s population; recurring traumas the soldiers faced even long after they won the war made me think of my sleepless, alcoholic uncle, still reeling from the memories of his inhuman military training as a spy to be sent to North Korea.

Just like my family, the various narrators of The Unwomanly Face of War bore the brunt of war and suffered its aftershocks in the guts. What I admire the most about Alexievich’s writing is that it does not flinch from the atrocities of war, that it lets the survivors speak their own languages, still raw and pulsing with visceral pains. Alexievich writes in the beginning of the book that the manuscript of The Unwomanly Face of War has been rejected by publishers for years under the same verdict: the violence of war described in her work is too horrendous, too realistic. But Alexievich refused to censor or tone down the words of her subjects to make them more palatable.

What I hoped to do with 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster was similar. I tried to depict the pains of my family and those who endured the same brutalities with an unflinching eye. It was indeed agonizing for me to recall the story of my nineteen-year-old grandmother escaping a rape by American soldiers during the Korean War, with my two-year-old father holding her hand and his little sister inside her belly.

For me to write about it in details, while pregnant with my second child, just like my grandmother in her story, was even more painful. It isn’t always easy to gaze at an open wound, but however painful it is to hear such stories or to write about them, it is much more difficult for the wounded to share them. Alexievich writes that countless women she interviewed often cried a lot, shouted. Some swallowed heart pills, called an ambulance after she was gone. Even so, they begged her to come back: “Be sure to come. We’ve been silent so long. Forty years…,” they told her.

Reading hundreds of wounded voices in their raw truths was, to me, devastating. And yet it was also incredibly comforting and uplifting. It was as though they were telling me and my family that we weren’t alone in these memories of hushed atrocities, that our little stories of suffering, although we are no heroes with shiny medals and badges, deserve to be heard—just like theirs.

In the prologue of 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster, an obituarist says “sometimes the best thing you can give to others suffering is your ears.” I hope I have fully given mine to my characters, without turning my eyes away from their open wounds no matter how frightening they might be.

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8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

There is a story from the 1970s often told by Roman historians of gender. It goes like this: students at an American college approached their male professor, a revered Roman historian, to request a course on women in Roman history. They, being among the first women ever to study ancient history at this university, wanted to see themselves on their syllabus.

Their professor disagreed. To their dismay, he replied that he may as well do a course on Roman dogs. The professor’s meaning was clear: women have no place in history. History is not about women, or children or non-binary people or indeed dogs. History, to him and to an awful lot of people, is the Doing of Important Things. It is winning battles and having Important Opinions In Public. History is politics and public deeds. Women don’t make history.

The history of the Roman Empire is usually told in this mould. It starts with Romulus, moves through Brutus overthrowing Tarquin, bounces through an appallingly tedious list of expansionist battles and generals and consuls, before emerging into the political stab-fest of the Late Republic. From there, it runs through all the emperors, occasionally mentioning a wife or mother to show how badly things can go when women take control, until Constantine invents Christianity and then Attila the Hun rolls up and ruins it.

But the history of Rome and its empire is so much more than just emperors and politicians and generals. History is so much more than Important Things. You and I, right now, are living through history. In the future, history books will be written about the times we live in, and we won’t be in them because we (mostly) do not do Important Things.

History, though, still includes us. It includes women who are not prime ministers or queens or capital-I Important. History happens to women (and men) as much as they make it.

My new book, A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, is a revisionist history of the Roman Empire with Important Things relegated to the background. This is a history of the things the Roman male historians and biographers never wanted to write about and certainly didn’t want us to be writing about. This is a history of the things the Roman history writers designated as domestic, feminine, boring and worthless. It is a history of individuals, because, to quote Svetlana Alexievich, “this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything really happens.”

By focusing on women, we discover a whole new history of the Roman Empire, one where marriage is as important as war and where what it is to be Roman is constantly being reassessed. Including women in history forces us, as historians, to re-evaluate what a Roman was, what Romanness was, and to confront the immense scope of the Roman Empire. Including women deepens our understanding of Roman history and Roman life.

When Romulus founded Rome, he knew that his city would not be complete until it included women; the history of Rome is equally incomplete without them.

Here are five facts about Roman Women you might not know, but should:

Once you start looking for women in the Roman world, you find loads of them.
If I asked you to imagine ancient Rome, I suspect you would imagine a very masculine space. White men in white togas standing next to white columns, perhaps. Or muscle-bound gladiators beating the life out of each other in the arena. Or maybe rows of helmeted soldiers brandishing swords and shields and sandals. Women do not feature highly in most imagined versions of Rome.

In part, this is the fault of the literary sources, who wrote about men and war and politics, but it is also the fault of modern readers who have refused to look beyond those literary sources. Once we take a step outside to look at other sources, like inscriptions and archaeology and letters, or ask new questions of the histories, we suddenly find ourselves in a world full of women living lives that are full and rich and exciting.

Our eyes are opened to the fact that women are all over the damn place doing all sorts of brilliant and average things, running businesses, teaching, learning, disrupting conspiracies, being integral to state religions and anything else you can think of. The Roman empire was positively littered with average women and they deserve a look in when we imagine it.

The main women we know about are the most elite elites, and they aren’t representative.
One of the main stumbling blocks in writing or learning about Roman women from the literary sources is that they are exclusively interested in the lives of the most rarified elites. Histories were only interested in the imperial family and the senators who surrounded them. The imperial family are, by definition, weird. Their concerns are not the concerns of literally anyone else in the whole empire.

Extrapolating from the experiences of empresses like Livia and Agrippina the Younger to the experiences of Aurelia Macula, a midwife who lived in Maktar, Tunisia is as reasonable as extrapolating the experiences of Queen Victoria to me. Technically, yes, we were both English women but that is the beginning and end of what we have in common.

Senatorial women are equally removed from normal experience because being a Senator was not a job. It was an anti-job. In order to be a Senator, a man had to own over one million sesterces of property and he was not allowed to earn that. These property qualifications were checked with surprising regularity and meant that women of Senatorial rank literally had to come from generational wealth and were banned from making money by normal means not because of their gender, but because of their class.

They also had to abide by morality legislation which specifically only applied to women of Senatorial rank, which was always a small number of women. Their experiences cannot be generalized to other populations, especially to enslaved and formerly enslaved women.

The Roman empire spanned one thousand years and five million square miles, and ninety-nine percent of the women who lived and breathed and laughed and died in that empire were not imperial or senatorial women. The rules of morality, lifestyle and participation in public life that governed the one percent in Rome simply did not apply to everyone else.

Law codes don’t describe reality.
A regularly repeated fact about Roman women is that they had no legal majority; women in the Roman empire were legally children for their entire lives and could do no legal business without a male guardian. In law, this is true but it takes only the most cursory look around the empire to find exceptions which complicate the black and white law.

In the province of Arabia, for example, in the town of Mahoza near modern Baghdad, a woman named Babatha repeatedly petitioned the Roman provincial governor in Petra throughout the 120s C.E. regarding debts owed to her by her deceased husband and the guardianship of her son, Jesus. As a Jewish woman and a non-citizen, she could not represent herself in court and so she was represented by an elite Roman citizen, a woman named Julia Crispina. They later tried to sue one another for unspecified acts of violence. Women apparently appeared in court as a matter of course.

Thirty years before Babatha was born, a woman called Julia Felix died in Pompeii. At the time that Vesuvius erupted, Julia had been in the process of putting her business up for rent and had just neatly painted a To Let sign on her wall. She ran a leisure complex, containing shops, baths, hot food stalls, gardens, apartments and the closest thing the Romans had to a proper restaurant.

In her To Let sign, she is the only listed owner and no guardian or man is mentioned at all. Clearly, the idea that woman could not do legal business is less set in stone than we might want them to be. Women did act as adults and as autonomous beings all the time, all over the empire.

Roman women weren’t caged domestic animals.
The other way in which too much emphasis on aristocratic women in Roman history skews perspectives horribly is that it erases all the working women in the Roman world and from the category of woman. Aristocratic sources written by aristocratic men about the aristocracy, which includes enormous expensive epitaphs for rich women, emphasize domesticity as a woman’s only virtue.

If you only read elite sources about rich people then you get stuck with the impression that Roman women were only allowed to have children and weave wool and stare at the walls of their houses like the protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper. This is a fiction designed by and for a class who prized domesticity as a mark of wealth and luxury because they could afford to own other women who worked for them.

Shift your focus ever so slightly away from the upper classes and you’ll find women working, earning and spending money and living in the world. A terrifying number of these women were enslaved, like Deftri and Amica who drew their feet and their names on a tile that ended up on a temple in Pietrabbondante. Many were formerly enslaved women withprofessions, like Naevia Clara, an educated physician in Rome, or Hispala Faceana, a sex worker. Others were freeborn like Septimia Statonice, a shoemaker, Livinia Primagenia, a perfume-maker who died at 71 years old. All these women survive on tombstones which celebrate them for their domestic achievements.

Even elite women clearly did not really live in a separate domestic “feminine domain”. The wives, sisters and daughters of senators and emperors regularly involved themselves in the daily realities of political life. Even Turia, a profoundly conservative woman of Senatorial rank who is known only from a long epitaph from the Late Republic, is lauded by her husband for fighting several court cases, fighting off a home invasion, personally petitioning Julius Caesar and Octavian, and breaking the law to save his life.

Looking at women, and how they present themselves, humanizes history.
When we write histories of people who are not cis men, we get to rewrite history. We get to add color and humanity to stories that feel well-trodden and we get to contest old tropes. Including enslaved women, freed women, Syrian women, business women, in Roman history undermines the image of ancient Rome as a homogenous, white paragon of an imagined “Western culture” and disrupts the wet dreams of fascists and racists about the European past.

Including these women in our histories of the Roman empire reveals that it was both a multicultural, multiracial empire where women from Iraq, Albania, England and Egypt could all call themselves Roman and a brutal slave state which stole the lives of uncountable millions. Telling the stories of women across the empire reveals Roman army camps to be spaces full of families having birthday parties, and Roman cities to be centered on games where criminals were tortured and murdered for entertainment.

These stories humanize and complicate history, which is after all just stories of people in all our horrible, wonderful glory.

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A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon is available via Abrams Books.

“Nothing is more American than meatpacking,” writes Alice Driver early in her new book Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company. As she then proceeds to show us, little in American life is also more hidden from the general public than meatpacking work.

I can’t remember when I first read Alice Driver, whether it was one of her personal essays in the Oxford American, her investigative work from the border or, more recently, her articles in the The New York Review of Books, including “Their Lives on the Line.” Her book, which draws from those articles, tells the intimate story of a handful of workers from Tyson’s chicken processing plants in rural Arkansas during the Covid pandemic, but woven into that narrative is the much longer tale of the meatpacking industry and the politicians and political landscape that ceded them the power they how wield—to dangerous and at times deadly ends.

Alice and I wrote back and forth via email and Google docs in mid-August, me from my home in Arizona and she from Little Rock, Arkansas.

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Sarah Viren: Life and Death of the American Worker is a book that you tell us you’ve long wanted to write, possibly since you were a kid growing up alongside meat packing workers in rural Arkansas, but definitely during the last decade of your life as a freelance journalist. You were only able to start work on this book in 2020, though, when you received a grant to interview workers at Tyson’s chicken processing plants.

What changed in the world at large, and possibly also in your personal world, that allowed you to tell this story now?

Alice Driver: In the pandemic, suddenly everyone was reevaluating the meaning of work, of what it means to labor and the conditions of that labor. I had wanted to write about meatpacking workers since 2013 when my mom started volunteering to support a community of several hundred Karen refugees from Myanmar who arrived in Clarksville, Arkansas and worked, largely, at Tyson Foods.

One of my initial ideas was to do a project about the immigrant and refugee workers at Tyson Foods and their gardens. Many immigrant communities grow their own food, which provides a contrast to the work they do in meatpacking, a largely inhumane system for workers and animals, not to mention the environment given the reality of climate change.

I didn’t receive funding to write about meatpacking workers and labor conditions at Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in the U.S. until 2020 when the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the National Geographic Covid-19 Emergency Fund provided support to work on an article. What started out as one article became four years of my life.

Meatpacking plants were the second largest sites of Covid infection behind prisons. When workers started dying, their families, many of whom also work at Tyson, became less afraid of retaliation from Tyson because they wanted justice for the dead.

Workers include vulnerable populations such as the undocumented, children, and imprisoned people, and the fear of retaliation by the company has often silenced them. The bravery of the workers who spoke to me cannot be overstated.

SV: Svetlana Alexievich once called her books “novels in voices” and, though there are significant differences in your approach, I thought of that descriptor while reading your book. While you occasionally appear within the narrative as a reporter or observer, you mostly let the people at the center—many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America who worked at Tyson’s chicken processing plants—tell their own stories in their own words with little interruption or interpretation from you.

Which books were most influential to you when writing and structuring Life and Death of the American Worker?

AD: I studied Spanish at Berea College in rural Kentucky. It was founded in 1855 to educate freed slaves and students with limited economic resources. My experience at Berea College shaped me and my book. The professors and writers I met there have informed my belief in seeking justice and equality through writing.

My Spanish professors, Dr. Margarita Graetzer and Dr. Fred de Rosset, introduced me to the writing of Elena Poniatowska, Rosario Castellanos, Juan Rulfo, and Mario Bellatin. Poniatowska wrote extensively about social movements and social justice in Mexico and her body of work influenced me greatly.

While at Berea, I studied with poet Nikky Finney, spent time with bell hooks, and became friends with classmates C.E. Morgan and Jill Damatac, who write with singular strength and vision. I loved Cristina Rivera Garza’s work since the first moment I read Nadie me verá llorar and Lilliana’s Invincible Summer is a book that lives in me. I completed a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies with a focus on Latin American literature and then received a postdoctoral fellowship to study at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico.

While living in Mexico City, I met Elena Poniatowska in the street and we became friends. I recently interviewed her for the Library of Congress. My literary and poetic universe is informed by a constellation of Latin American writers including Yuri Herrera, Valeria Luiselli, Guadalupe Nettel (who has an incredible short story in which cockroaches are made into ceviche), and Homero Aridjis, who informed the structure of my book.

SV: I was struck, reading, how often language barriers also became safety issues for meat processing workers, like how workers reported that Tyson would ask them to sign release forms and other documents in English, even when the company knows so many of its workers can’t read what they’re signing. As you explain in an author’s note, “language is central to my work, and translation is a literary act.”

Can you talk about the role of translation in this book, both in the reporting and writing process?

AD: I grew up in rural Arkansas, and I didn’t start studying Spanish until I was at Berea College. I have a strong southern accent, and I felt ashamed of that when I spoke Spanish. But I desperately wanted to be fluent. To that end, I completed a masters and Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. After finishing my program, I moved to Mexico City, where I lived for many years.

I knew that as a journalist and writer, I wanted to work in Spanish. This means that for the past decade, I have been translating my interviews from Spanish into English. Initially I didn’t think of myself as a translator, but it is one of the parts of my process that I love and deeply respect.

If I was not fluent in Spanish, I would not have been able to write this book. Linguistic and cultural fluency is a sign of respect to those I interview, and it was key to building the trust necessary to investigate a global company valued in the billions. I reported most of the book in Spanish and transcribed the interviews.

The hours I spent listening to workers’ voices informed the emotional heart of the book. Translation is about heart, emotion, truth and finding the language that captures the moment—much that goes beyond the technical act of translation.

SV: Another texturing element of this book is the inclusion of photographs of meat packing workers and the landscape of their lives. There is a hint here of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, although your project foregrounds the writing.

Can you tell me about your decision to work alongside a photographer (or photographers)? What is your hope for how the photographs will be read alongside your writing?

AD: As a journalist, I have long been obsessed with photography—I went through a brief period where I considered going to photography school. But I realized I could center photography in my writing and use my budget, when I was given one, to hire photographers I admired.

When I started working on this project, one of the things that struck me was that in the U.S. we rarely see images of meatpacking workers unless they are produced by the PR departments of meatpacking companies. Liz Sanders is an Arkansas photographer who I’ve known for years, and we drove around the state visiting workers at their homes for four years. In the early pandemic, this work was quite complicated.

Liz moves with a quiet, poetic strength, and her portraits of workers are intimate and show their resilience, commitment, and faith. Many workers didn’t want their faces or identifying details photographed, and Liz created a body of work with the greatest respect for the workers.

While writing articles related to the book, I worked with Mexican photographer Jacky Muniello and National Geographic photographer John Stanmeyer. Jacky is a long-time collaborator of mine, and she navigates complicated projects with ease and humor. I met John working on an article for National Geographic, and his body of work reflects his ability to take a mundane scene and, through pure perseverance, document it in a way that stays with you.

The book and the photos show the workers organizing themselves to demand safe labor conditions. Workers are immigrants, many undocumented; imprisoned people; and children and they are upholding our food system with strength and dignity. We should listen to them and honor their work and lives.

SV: In your “Acknowledgements” section, you talk briefly about how hard it was to write this book, in part the enormity of the project but also because of the emotional toll of witnessing the preventable suffering of so many people. It was, in turn, a devastating book to read.

But it was also an empowering one, especially as we learn the stories of workers who risked their lives and livelihood to take part in organized labor movements and an eventual lawsuit against Tyson. I know hope can be a dangerous thing, but what is your hope for how the meat packing industry might change in the next five or ten years, and what would it take to get us to that place?

AD: My hope is that we listen to workers and to the vision they have for the meat packing industry. Organizations founded by workers, like Venceremos in Arkansas and the Coalition for Immokalee Workers in Florida, provide a model for creating change on the state and national level.

In the next five years, I hope the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the organization that oversees the meatpacking industry, will be fully funded and staffed. In terms of the fines that OSHA levies against meat packing companies, it should not be cheaper for a company to injure, disable or kill a worker than to provide safe work conditions.

In the next ten, our politicians need to rethink health and safety legislation regarding the meatpacking industry with a focus on creating safe labor conditions and addressing climate change. The first step to getting to that place is for us as a nation to recognize and honor the immigrants who undertake one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S.

Shortly before my first business trip to Nigeria, I asked a group of colleagues—all learned West Africa analysts—to recommend a few books that would familiarize me with the powerhouse African nation.

Every one of them recommended works of fiction.

This provoked a bit of head-scratching: I was expecting a selection of historical tracts and political screeds. In the end, my colleagues were wiser than I thought: First, the works, including the landmark Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, were gorgeously written. Second, even at half-way through the list, I thought I was learning as much about Nigerians as I was about Nigeria, a goal historical tracts and political screeds typically fail to reach.

Today, understanding Russia is more important than ever, as impossible as that task may be. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has passed its third anniversary, but US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin look to be re-entering bromance mode. Talks of a ceasefire in Ukraine and a rapprochement between Washington and Moscow are in full swing. At a time like is, it would serve all of us well to try to know the Russian people and their history a bit better.

Those who choose to familiarize themselves with Russia are spoiled for choice on all fronts: fiction, nonfiction, books in Russian, books in translation. This makes careful selection all the more important, especially because Russia is a politically charged place. A lot of books about Russia read as if title was chosen first, and the text selected later, to back-fill an argument.

Timing is also important. Like many countries, modern Russia arrived at its current state via an historical continuum punctuated by catastrophic convulsion. Wars, revolutions, busted ideologies, attempted coups, and the centuries-long grind of conquest and defeat all etched their imprint on the Russia we see now.

To be practical about my own book recommendations, it’s best to focus on the Soviet and Russian periods, and the seismic transition between the two. And we will stick resolutely to non-fiction.

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Joshua Yaffa, Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia

How did a Chechen human rights activist morph into a supporter of a murderous warlord? How did a television producer with blockbuster ambitions become the figurehead of Russia’s state propaganda machine?

In Joshua Yaffa’s detailed and exquisitely written book the reader learns about modern-day Russia by meeting, chapter after chapter, a series of individuals who have made life-altering compromises to survive Putin’s repressive autocracy. Yaffa’s subjects range from figures of national prominence to provincial parish priests. Without being preachy or judgmental, the book describes and then dissects the power of a political system that allows no meaningful resistance.

Between Two Fires‘ subject is Russia and Russians, but its lessons are universal. Curious followers of current events often ask how people survive in authoritarian regimes. Yaffa’s book offers an important exploration of the creeping erosion of ambition, principle, and will that is part survival tactic and part surrender.

Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time

“The future was not where we thought it would be,” writes Nobel laureate and Belarusian exile Svetlana Alexievich in her epic oral history of the wasteland left in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Secondhand Time is a heavy lift, but lavishly rewards the persistent reader. The book’s harrowing personas, its relentless cadence and its encyclopedic structure elevate it above a simple oral history.

More than anything else, Secondhand Time depicts a landscape of turbulent desolation both profound and quotidian. To the West, the demise of the Soviet Union was a triumphant victory and the end of the Cold War. For Soviets, it was the implosion of a universal belief system whose pieces could never be reassembled or replaced.

The voices in Secondhand Time are nothing less than haunting.

Owen Matthews, Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War

Stalin’s Children, by award-winning British author Owen Matthews, first brings alive for the reader the searing deprivation of Stalinism and war and their destructive forces on an earlier generation of his family. Matthews then tells the 1960’s era story of his parents—a British father and a Russian mother—seeking to create their own, new family, against the monolithic opposition of the Soviet Union and through the black-out fabric of the Iron Curtain.

Matthews effortlessly weaves together strands of history, biography, and memoir into a story that is both grand and intimate, in writing that is hard to finish unmoved. If you find it difficult to cast your mind back to, or want for the first time to understand, what the Soviet Union was and what it did to its millions of inhabitants—all very real people with desires and needs—this book will take you there

Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution

Climb aboard an oligarch’s jet and float above a country whose most prized assets were sold for a song. Sit inside the room in Davos—capitalism’s highest altar—where one of the world’s greatest swindles was devised. Sup at one of Russia’s most exclusive dinner tables, where fierce business rivalries were discussed, defused and designed into spheres of influence in Russia’s emerging political and economic landscape.

Chrystia Freeland’s Sale of the Century—written when she was a Moscow-based journalistic superstar for The Financial Times—is the story of how 1990s Russia mislaid the cornerstones of a new nation. Boris Yeltsin’s failed stewardship of Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism birthed a country that epically failed its citizens, except for the equivalent of Russia’s 0.0001%.

That rarefied layer kept—and enhanced—its spoils by financing Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign in exchange for the keys to the economy, and they never looked back. Until Putin came to town. Freeland, until recently deputy prime minister and finance minister of Canada, unflinchingly chronicled the free-for-all that was Russia’s early days. Experience that maniacal decade with her.

David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

Hedrick Smith’s The Russians—the landmark, 1976 best-seller that Americans once read to ponder the character of the Soviet citizen—is hard to find on bookshelves. David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is its encyclopedic, compelling, and entirely worthy heir. “This book, after all,” Remnick writes, “chronicles the last days of one of the cruelest regimes in human history.”

Once a Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post and now editor-in-chief of The New Yorker magazine, Remnick was in Russia for the collapse of the Soviet Union. His reporting, insights and robust yet nuanced writing—a combination that won the book the Pulitzer Prize—reveals the depressing, corrosive rot of the Soviet construct followed by the ungoverned, denial-laced euphoria of the new Russian Federation.

Remnick wrote Lenin’s Tomb in 1993; I took this book with me when I moved to Moscow in 1994, and devoured it while my own reporter’s notebooks were still pristine. It has stayed with me ever since.

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Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia by Charles Hecker is available via Oxford University Press.