Latest news with #Prudence
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Akron at 200: Polygamy, a purse snatcher and singing dogs
As Akron celebrates its bicentennial in 2025, we're looking back at two centuries of headlines. Visit every Sunday morning throughout the bicentennial year for a look back at the week in Akron history. Here's what happened April 20-26 in local history: 1825: Locally produced goods traveled far. The schooner Prudence left Cleveland for Buffalo with a Northeast Ohio cargo of flour, ashes, whiskey, pork, butter and cheese. Meanwhile, the schooner Lake Serpent also arrived in Buffalo from Cleveland, carrying ashes, hams and ginseng. The construction of a canal would soon allow such products to be shipped south to the Ohio River. 1875: Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Brigham Young, spoke at the Academy of Music at Main and Market streets in downtown Akron. The Illinois native had recently separated from the Mormon church leader and was on a national tour to tell her story and lecture against polygamy in the United States. The Utah-centered church had excommunicated her in 1874. 1925: Hundreds of citizens joined Akron police in chasing a man who had allegedly stolen money from a purse. The crowd circled the Masonic Temple at High and Mill streets to thwart the suspect's escape. Officer Frank J. Bucher found Edgar Gargar, 19, hiding behind a car and holding a crumpled $10 bill. 'Here it is: Take it,' he told the arresting officer. 1975: Fifteen dogs took part in a howling contest at Chapel Hill Mall. Northeastern Ohio Dog Services sponsored the 'singing dog show' to raise money for a shelter. Pooh, a German shepherd sponsored by Summit County Children's Home, won first prize for his rendition of 'oorf, oorf, oorf.' Runner-up Henry, a miniature schnauzer, wailed at a high pitch as owners Sue and Beth Kartarius sang 'How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?' 2000: Akron health inspectors entered a North Hill home and found 333 rats, 146 mice, 16 gerbils, eight birds, six cats, four rabbits, three dogs, one hamster, one turtle, one boa constrictor and one iguana. Thayer Street neighbors had complained of odors. The animals were sent to the Humane Society of Greater Akron, which hoped to find new homes for them. Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@ Quaker Square revisited: Vintage photos of Akron shops and hotel This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: This week in Akron history for April 20, 2025
New York Times
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Review: ‘Casualties of Truth,' by Lauren Francis-Sharma
CASUALTIES OF TRUTH, by Lauren Francis-Sharma Each of Lauren Francis-Sharma's three novels begins with a calculated killing. In her 2014 debut, ''Til the Well Runs Dry,' a desperate Trinidadian girl catches and slaughters a wild opossum to feed her family. In 2020's 'Book of the Little Axe,' a band of Crow boys stalks and takes down a bighorn sheep on a hunting expedition. Now, in 'Casualties of Truth,' Francis-Sharma's tense, timely new novel about the monstrous legacy of South African apartheid, the killing in the opening pages is of a man. Like the opossum and the sheep, he is also being hunted for sustenance, albeit sustenance of a different, darker, figurative kind. The deceased is a white policeman in 1996 Johannesburg. At the book's outset, he is lamenting Mandela's presidency and his own perceived loss of power under it, limping from injuries sustained during an unexplained altercation with an American girl. In the early hours of the following morning, his throat is slit by an unseen assailant. We later learn that the policeman's execution was an act of revenge: an attempt to claim justice for other stolen lives, for stolen dignity, for the stolen agency of an entire traumatized country. But at what cost? This is the uneasy question at the center of the story: Can we ever really atone for violence without more violence? And can we survive what has been done to us without sacrificing our own humanity in the process? From 1996 Johannesburg, the novel flashes forward to 2018 Washington, D.C., where Prudence Wright and her husband, Davis, are by all outward appearances very happily married. The Wrights are wealthy, successful and attractive, and they own an enormous home in Bethesda, Md. While Prudence contends that they are not a real Black Washington power couple, 'at least not in the way Black Washingtonians knew Black Washington power couples to be,' she and Davis still turn heads when they enter a room together. The Prudence we meet in 2018 is guarded, carefully composed, the kind of woman who has sharpened herself to a point out of self-preservation. After a tragedy-scarred childhood in Baltimore, she went on to earn three Ivy League degrees and a partnership at McKinsey before stepping back from her career to stay at home with her autistic son. On the stormy D.C. night when Prudence's story begins, she is accompanying Davis to meet his new colleague at what she assumes will be a tedious work dinner. But when the colleague arrives at the restaurant he turns out to be Matshediso, a South African man whose life collided with Prudence's two decades earlier, when she spent a few months in Johannesburg for a law school internship. Matshediso knows secrets from Prudence's past that still haunt her, and it is no coincidence that he has suddenly re-materialized as an I.T. guy at her husband's law firm. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Boston Globe
05-02-2025
- Boston Globe
Confronting difficult moral questions in ‘Casualties of Truth'
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up At gunpoint, the policeman forces Prudence to the dark rear of the gas station and violates her. To him, Prudence is an opportunity. By brutalizing her, he can reassert his dominance and resist the winds of change. Advertisement After Prudence escapes with a punch to his kneecap and the help of a Black South African man named Matshediso, the policeman returns to work, where he cracks jokes with his fellow officers. Prudence's suffering is insignificant to him. He's worried only about his swollen knee, the lies he'll have to tell his wife, and the end of life as he knows it under South Africa's Black leadership. These scenes take place against the backdrop of a fictionalized version of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by the Mandela government to help the country contend with the systemic injustices of the past. Related : The commission functioned much like a court, investigating and compiling a meticulous record of the apartheid era's crimes based on testimony from both its victims and perpetrators, much of which was televised. Inherent in its work were profound questions — how to uncover buried truths, such as the South African police and military's pervasive tactics of torture, rape, murder, and the disappearance of Black South Africans, without inflaming racial tensions? How to hold people accountable for wrongdoing while beginning anew as a multiracial democracy? And how to balance justice for individuals with restoring society as a whole? Advertisement These questions are uncomfortable and perhaps unresolvable. Although South Africa's truth and reconciliation process was widely lauded, there were tradeoffs and unfinished business. 'Casualties of Truth' illuminates this reality, unsettling simple notions of public and private justice, retribution, harm, and healing. Indeed, by introducing the reader to the policeman first, Francis-Sharma ingeniously invites us to consider whether he and his comrades deserve the grace they're receiving and what use their confessions are for the victims. The commission offered perpetrators amnesty in exchange for illuminating the violent machinations of the apartheid system and confessing their roles in upholding it — roles some, like the policeman, are loath to relinquish. As Matshediso tells Prudence, 'I don't think I can live in peace simply because they confess.' Related : Francis-Sharma's frank and unnerving narration of the post-apartheid white backlash mind-set evoked my experience reading J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel, ' 'Disgrace' doesn't center the truth and reconciliation proceedings, but they're in the atmosphere. Like Francis-Sharma's policeman, Lurie is a man lashing out against the loss of his apartheid impunity — seeing himself as a victim of the new Black agenda that has politicized his private life. Francis-Sharma doesn't allow the policeman to play the victim for long. He is silenced by the end of the prologue. The rest of the book belongs to Prudence, as she reckons with the aftermath of her assault, bears witness to some of the painful and shocking testimony at the amnesty hearings as part of her internship, and grapples with what can and should be done to right personal and historical wrongs. Advertisement 'Casualties of Truth' alternates between two timelines. One follows Prudence's time in South Africa in 1996 and the other is set in 2018 and features an older Prudence who lives in a tony D.C. suburb with her lawyer husband and young son. This life is thrown into chaos by the sudden reappearance of Matshediso, the man who helped her in the Johannesburg gas station decades ago. The novel is underpinned by fierce and intelligent engagement with thorny questions, but it is also fueled by artful suspense. Why has Matshediso tracked Prudence down? What did they do in the hours after Prudence's assault? Is Prudence trying to forget the violence she experienced and witnessed or a crime she helped commit? When she reflects that 'perhaps brutality was an inevitable and understandable response to brutality, but it was in no way justified, no matter the historical context,' is she attempting to convince Matshediso or herself? Toward the end of the novel, Prudence makes some horror-movie-bizarre decisions. But even these seem to stem from Francis-Sharma's rigorous and edifying commitment to studying the reverberations of violence. She pushes her characters to the edge, where they must confront the moral costs of their darkest desires. CASUALTIES OF TRUTH By Lauren Francis-Sharma Atlantic Monthly Press, 272 pages, $27 Nadia Owusu is the author of a memoir, ' .' Advertisement
