It’s fair to say millions, possibly even billions, more people have heard Arnold McCuller than have heard of Arnold McCuller.
If you’ve heard the music of Phil Collins, or Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Lovett, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Bette Midler, Beck — the list goes on and on — you’ve heard Mr. McCuller.
A few months ago, Donatella Rovera was under rocket fire in Misrata, Libya. A couple of weeks ago Salil Shetty was in the slums of Suez, in Egypt, meeting with the families of the first casualties of the Egyptian uprising.
On Friday they were both seated on a sunny deck in Katama, sipping iced water and looking just like any of those other globe-trotters who concentrate here in summer. Except that in their case, the expression citizen of the world really means something.
Out in the middle of Meshacket Cove on the Edgartown Great Pond on Wednesday morning, David Schlezinger was going down for the third time, in nine feet of water.
He wasn’t drowning, though. It was quite the reverse. Dr. Schlezinger’s problem was his buoyancy. It’s hard to insert a long stake into the bottom of a pond when you can’t bring a lot of weight to bear on it.
On the face of it, Suellen Lazarus might seem an odd person to have started a book festival. She was a banker, not a professional bibliophile or bookstore owner or writer.
But in a way, it was her other busy life which led her to start such an event on the Vineyard six years ago. For she associates reading with downtime.
She is one of those people who always packs five or six books when she goes on vacation. Even if she doesn’t get around to reading them all, their mere presence is a happy indicator of leisure, a calming thing.
Let’s face it, there are few pursuits more quixotic than that of journalistic objectivity. The preview screening of the documentary movie Cape Spin: An American Power Struggle in Oak Bluffs on Tuesday night provided a perfect illustration of the point.
For 84 minutes, the film explored the issues involved in the controversial Cape Wind development. Then for another hour or so its makers were subjected by audience members to a torrent of claims and counterclaims about their objectivity.
Ultimately, war is merely the continuation of politics by other means. But intimately, it’s all about sociology and biology.
And that’s the aspect of war which engaged Sebastian Junger, in writing his book War, and making the documentary Restrepo — and also most of the overflow crowd which attended his address to the Hebrew Center Summer Institute on Thursday night.
Mr. Junger’s goal was not to explain the forces which drive the politicians who declare wars, but to explain the forces which drive those who fight them.
