Tina Rosenberg
Tina
Rosenberg (right) pictured in 1995 receiving The National
Book Award in Nonfiction for The Haunted Land. Pictured
with her is (left) Bruno Quinson, former NBF Board Chairman,
and (center) Neil Baldwin, the Foundation's Executive
Director.
While my interests and style as a writer have been
influenced by many books, including Move Your Shadow
by Joseph Lelyveld (about South Africa; the title comes
from an English to Fanagalo phrasebook's section of
useful sentences for golfers need to say to their caddies)
and Dispatches by Michael Herr (about the Vietnam
War), the work that has shaped mine the most is Eichmann
in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. When I first read
it, I was captivated by her choice of subject - the
use of justice to deal with the crime of a past dictatorship
- and it became my subject in my book The Haunted
Land, and in many of my magazine articles. I was
also impressed by her use of a writer's voice to organize
and interpret events for the reader, so that Eichmann's
trial becomes a vehicle for Arendt's own controversial
but impeccably argued ideas about guilt and responsibility.
Every sentence is unmistakably Hannah Arendt - acerbic,
clear and often funny.
|
