Books, etc.

Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal

Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal, by Conor Grennan.  New York: William Morrow, 2010.  307 pages, illustrated.  SHU Library: copies on order.

Buy this book --you will be contributing to Next Generation Nepal.  Conor Grennan co-founded this organization with Farid Ait-Mansour in 2006 to re-unite the lost children of Nepal with their families.  (--and buy it from independent local booksellers)

Nepal underwent a bloody civil war 1996-2006 that left the country even more desperately poor than it when it started --it is one of the poorest and least economically developed countries in the world.  A very rugged, mountainous terrain (including Mt. Everest or Sagarmāthā) isolates most mountain valleys from the capital Kathmandu.  During the war child traffickers solicited payments from anxious parents to "place" their children in safe situations in Kathmandu, but in reality dumped the children on the street and pocketed the money.  Thousands of children were traumatically separated from their parents in this manner, and war, poverty, and the difficulty of travel prevented parents from finding them.  The children were frequently mistreated, starved, and enslaved, and aid organizations could not begin to keep pace with the need for relief.

Grennan embarked on a round-the-world trip in 2004 after eight years at the East-West Institute in Prague and Brussels, working on post-conflict reconciliation in the Balkans.  He wound up volunteering for three months at Little Princes Orphanage in Godawari, near Kathmandu.  It changed his life, but he didn't realize how much until he continued his travels elsewhere.  In 2005 he returned to the children but was forced to leave in the chaotic last months of the war in April 2006.  Back in the United States, he found himself starting a non-profit organization to reunite seven Nepalese children he had met in 2006 with their families in Humla, perhaps the most remote region high in the far northwest corner of Nepal.

Next Generation Nepal took shape in 2006 when he returned after raising money and rented a house in cooperation with the Umbrella Foundation, a non-profit already working in Nepal.  Farid and Grennan founded Dhaulagiri House (named after one of the highest mountains) with six of the seven children he had encountered in 2006 (the seventh was found later).  When travel became safe Grennan set out for Humla just as winter weather came in December 2006.  Travelling by foot with a guide party and an injured knee, Grennan actually found many of the parents of the children in Godawari and began the slow process of reacquainting parents and children separated by years of war.

Meanwhile Grennan corresponded with Elizabeth Flanagan, a fellow UVA alum who had volunteered at a orphanage in Zambia.  She understood the depth of Grennan's passionate commitment to his work and throughout the book their relationship (via e-mail and in person) deepens until he proposes.  In 2007 Grennan and Flanagan return to the United States to continue their work, and today they live in Connecticut with their children.

Part advocacy and personal travelogue, part social history, part adventure, part love-story, Grennan's book recounts his unexpected journey from being "just a normal guy," fun-loving in college (according to his friend Josh Arbaugh) to tireless advocacy, to an understated Christian faith, and to unstinting devotion to children.  Grennan embraced his work seriously enough to study at the New York University Stern School of Business, graduating with an M.B.A. in 2010 so that he could better manage this organization.

Conor Grennan will be speaking at Sacred Heart University on Wednesday, October 17, 2012, sponsored by the University Library and the Common Core Curriculum.

--Gavin Ferriby

When Asia Was The World

When Asia Was the World, by Stewart Gordon. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2008.  228 pages. Library location: DS 5.95 .G67 2008

This fascinating book traces (according to the cover) the "traveling merchants, scholars, wariors, and monks who created the 'Riches of the East.'"  The author uses some fairly straightforward ideas from social network theory to interpret the traveling records of nine individuals who undertook long journeys for trade, scholarship, diplomacy, and pilgrimage across central and southern Asia from the seventh to the 16th centuries.

Vast scholarship informs this book, but it is all worn very lightly.  Gordon writes in a very accessible manner about individuals you probably have never heard of, and makes them interesting.  Ibn Fadlan in 921-922 undertakes a perilous journey from the heart of Caliphate (Baghadad) to the wilds of the Russian frontier, Almish, King of the Bulgars, on the Volga River.  This obscure journey takes on all the marks of frontier travel in any era: Ibn Fadlan was wiley, clever, lucky, and above all brave.

The Asian empires had many customs in common, such as robing (as a mark of favor and sign of power).  Traders did not represent sovereign powers or kings, and power was often distributed through kinship and tribal systems.  When Gordon finally recounts the Europeans who encountered this innovative, wealthy, and self-reflective Asian world, they seem strange: their armies cohere around command centers and survive the death of generals; traders were responsible to kings; powerful posts went to members of the same ethnicity and the white race.  Europeans held concepts of Christian and heathen which went far beyond sectarian divisions among the followers of the Buddha, or rivals in the Islamic umma (community of the faithful).

The great contribution of such scholarship is finally to glimpse one's own culture or history as though from the outside.   The book succeeds in doing just that --the restless, commercial, innovating Asians are "normal" and the Europeans are the outliers.  And so it was until the 18th century, when Europeans began to re-organize trade patterns millenia old.  I wonder whether Asia will in turn wind up re-organizing European and American trade and cultural patterns to resemble more closely the Asia portrayed in this book.

--Gavin Ferriby

Love and Miracles in an Italian-American Family

My Cousin the Saint: A Story of Love, Miracles, and an Italian Family Reunited.  By Justin Catanoso.  New York: William Morrow (HarperCollins), 2008, 2009.  xi, 337 pages.

This multi-layered story grows in the telling, like a long Italian family dinner that takes hours --different moods at different times, with a variety of pasta, meats, and sweets along the way (as well as plentiful wine).  The courses don't all run in order --but there are patterns of tastes.

The first layer is the story of Padre Gaetano Catanoso, a pious priest and shepherd of the poor of Calabria (the toe of the boot of Italy) (1879-1963).  The Padre labored in one of the most impoverished regions of Europe, a steep land perched over the sea poor both in material wealth and in imagination and spirit.  Buffetted by centuries of invasion, oppression, and the duplicity of rulers --not the least the Mafia-- Calabrians developed a protective fatalism and a skeptical hostility to  outsiders.  The Padre --both Calabrian and an "outsider" in the sense that he could see further than the searing poverty around him usually allowed-- radiated an activist holiness through earthquakes, Facism, wars, and the fatalism of those left behind by those many who left Calabria for a better life elsewhere.  When the Padre died, his holiness and life of service were vividly remembered by those around him, including clergy whom he had helped to train.

The second layer is the story of Catarina and Carmelo Catanoso, who emigrated from Calabria to Philadelphia, then to North Wildwood, New Jersey.  Their nine children realized much of the American dream of hard work and security, and their fifth child, Leonard Catanoso, in turn became the author's parents in a family saga of Italian-American assimilation.

The third layer is the story of Justin Catanoso himself, who never really became attached to the Catholic Church as a youth, and as a journalist became something of a polite but persistent skeptic.  His relative complacency or disinterest was challenged first, by discovery of the Calabrian Catanosos and the saintly Padre Gaetano (unknown to the American relations for more than a generation), and then by the mortal illness of Justin's brother Alan, who subsequently died in  2004.  Alan's illness and death --and the involvement of his family in a new dimension of faith --make the fourth layer of the story.

The fifth and final layer is the story of the canonization process -how a saint becomes a saint in the Catholic Church.  The evident care for accuracy and respect for both the material and the spiritual at the heart of this process make for a long and detailed account of how American and Calabrian Catanosos came to be in St. Peter's Square in October, 2005 for the official canonization of the Padre, now St. Gaetano Catanoso.  What difference does a saint make in the family?  What difference does the Padre now make in Justin's life, in the life of his family?

This is a engaging account of life, death, and faith in an Italian-American family --the latter portions on canonization are unavoidably less emotionally engaging than the author's account of Padre Gaetano, or the illness and death of the author's brother Alan.  Catanoso nevertheless gives an authentic account of how being Catholic has changed for him, and those things that continue to hold him to the church, and those things that make him want to run from it.  Written in a decidedly lay, non-theological voice, the journalist Catanoso covers his story with graceful prose and a sure eye for telling detail.

--Gavin Ferriby