Judy Stone, Author/Interviewer, baby sister of I.F. Stone (A Minority of One;d.1988)has collected her interviews conducted over 40 years. (j.stone01@rcn.com;www.silmanpress.com;$29.92;486 pages). Studs Terkel: The wit, independence and journalistic guts to call the shots as she sees them. An amazing collection of characters, says Paul Newman, I wish I were one of them. On 2/7/07 Judy was interviewed by Turkish documentary film maker, Alev Croutier Harem World Behind the Veil/ and Judy was as humble, modest, unpretentious as always. Alright, her big brother Izzy was reading Spinoza as a wee lad of 10; Judy was writing her first film criticism at 13. Twice she dropped out of prestigious universities and fled Philadelphia (like W.C. Fields) to be in San Francisco filled with creative people" and through a circuitous route wound up happily as a copy editor for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Egad, someone remarked, Judy likes HUNGARIAN films --let's give her a job as film critic. The rest is history and she never looked back! Steve Wasserman of the Los Angeles Time calls her a genius at unlocking defenses and coaxing self-revelations from artists/thinkers/filmmakers as diverse as Milosz, Doctorow, Amos Oz, Ali Nasser, Joan Chen, Gus Lee, Maya Angelou, Jean Genet, Orhan Pamuk, Manuel Puig, Guillermo del Toro (pre-Pan's Labyrinth), innovative Iranian directors, Kureishi, Doris Lessing, Alfred Hitchcock, Rolf Hochhuth, Salyajit Ray, Leonard Wolf, Gus Van Sant, Jeremy Irons, and scores of others.
Diverse areas: Hot/cold wars;One land/Many voices;Eastern lights;Transitions;Transitions;What are dissidents good for;Are we European or Asian;Latin Beat;Means & Ends;The Veiled Society;Middle East; Family; G-d Forbid that we should use His name; Balkan Bombshell; Another way of life; and Journeys.
We hear their voices as they discuss art, politics, and culture. A writer's lot is never a happy one, so some say, but Judy always won people over with her compassion, wit, good humor. She believes the whole world is a diaspora now. "We're all exiles." She is an exceptional woman who was so unobtrusive that she kept her prejudices out of the interviews. For 40 years, all she did was ask and boy, was she good! Read the book and see how she plucked pearls of wisdom!
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