Help Haiti: Donate to a Grassroots Healthcare Organization

If you've been wondering how and where to donate to Haiti relief work, have meant to give but haven't yet done so, have given already but can give more, you can't do better than give to Partners in Health. PIH, founded by Paul Farmer, has worked in Haiti for 25 years building a grassroots healthcare organization that has become a model for healthcare for the poor in the developing world. PIH knows the people and the culture and how to get things done. Indeed, right now its hospital and clinics are among the few still standing. Moreover, PIH will still be in Haiti when the crisis is over and the media spotlight has moved on.

Donate here: Stand With Haiti -- Partners In Health

New Nation Column: "Free Nazia Quazi"

Nazia Quazi, a dual Canadian-Indian citizen, has been held in Saudi Arabia for two years against her will because her male guardian won't give his permission for her to leave. The Canadian Embassy in Riyadh doesn't want to become involved in what it views as a Muslim family dispute. This is the second time in the past year that Canada refused to acknowledge the basic human rights of one of its female citizens trapped in Saudi Arabia. Read more here.

New Nation Column: "The Decade for Women: Forward, Backward, Sideways?"

Read Pollitt's review of how American women have fared during the previous decade here.

The Mind-Body Problem Reviewed in the New York Times' Sunday Book Review

Eric McHenry reviewed Pollitt's The Mind-Body Problem in this week's Sunday Book Review for the New York Times:

“Everywhere I look I see my fate,” Pollitt writes, and she’s not kidding. Studying the ragtag riders on a New York subway at night, she thinks “of Xerxes, how he reviewed his troops / and wept to think that . . . / not one would be alive in a hundred years.” The kitschy collectibles in a schoolyard rummage sale have crossed decades to deliver the message “that we lose even what we never had.” “The Mind-Body Problem,” Pollitt’s second collection of poems (and her first in close to 30 years), is a book consumed not so much with mortality as with transience, of which mortality is one aspect. Another is the way our most casual choices come to define us, a process Pollitt likes to enact by letting casual-seeming analogies take over whole poems. “Death can’t help but look friendly / when all your friends live there,” she writes in “Old,” “while more and more / each day’s like a smoky party / where the music hurts and strangers insist that they know you.” In the ­poem’s final lines you’re still at that awful party, checking your watch and saying “to no one in particular, / If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go home now.” Pollitt knows how to pace a poem — where it ought to turn, tense and relax. She knows how many specifics she needs to save up in order to afford an abstraction, and how to cinch off a free-verse lyric with pentametrical certainty: “wrapped in white tissue paper, like a torch”; “the silent, bright elms burn themselves away.” A few of the poems feel pat and rhetorical (Pollitt, a longtime columnist for The Nation, is persuasive for a living). But “The Mind-Body Problem” is an affecting and satisfying book.

Pollitt Reviews J.M. Coetzee's "Summertime" in the New York Times

Check out Katha Pollitt's New York Times review of J.M. Coetzee's last novel, Summertime. Presented as the author's autobiography, the book is in fact a work of fiction, written in present tense and narrated by a third-person interviewer. Read the full review here.

An excerpt:

It’s tempting to see “Summertime” as Mr. Coetzee’s attempt to answer critics’ charges of misogyny by offering a quartet of humorous, mature, strong female characters who haven’t much use for their gloomy, self-absorbed author. One can also see them as resistant muses who upstage the writer by putting themselves at the center of a story that is supposed to be, after all, about him. Readers alert to writerly games about art and reality, however, will note that even if they are modeled after actual people, Julia and the rest are literary characters, the inventions of the novelist, who imagined for them the very qualities they think he does not possess.