Ducking Political Tomatoes, At a Book Festival

It was hotter than hell at the UCLA Festival of Books over the weekend, but it didn't stop almost a hundred and fifty thousand people from showing up. For books. To read. Who knew?

It wasn't all intellectual warm fuzzies however. Heated debates, audience heckling and stern words were exchanged when neo-con David Frum and McCain loyalist Dan Schnur took the stage with lefties Eric Alterman and Arianna Huffington. I just tried to steer clear of the metaphorical tomato throwing that went on every time each side tried to make a point.

Huffington, the blog-master of the lefties exclaimed in her perfect Zsa Zsa Gabor lilt, that some topics just weren't up for debate, "Global warming is a fact and it's happening. That's it." Yes, dahhhlink!

Over at the can't-we-all-just-get-along panel, Blurring Boundaries, Pico Iyer, Tony Cohan and Jenny Price, spoke reverently about the thrill of becoming immersed in other cultures to learn more about themselves. While moderator Thomas Curwen lamented the tragedy of going to a remote part of Greenland to find the kids were all listening to "50 Cents" (I think he meant Cent), Iyer said he never would have seen the Metallica documentary, Some Kind of Monster, now one of his favorite films without travel. What could be better cultural immersion than that!?

Current administration bashing ensued from famed rebel rouser Gore Vidal and beloved sci-fi iconoclast Ray Bradbury, but over at the Shooting the Tube panel all Steve Hawk, Steven Kotler, Kem Nunn and David Rensin wanted to talk about was why surfing is so hard to talk about. "It's something you do," Hawk waxes. "Telling you about the perfect wave I just surfed is really boring. It's about doing it, man."

Too true. Because after 2 days in the Los Angeles heat, all I wanted to do was hit a beach with perfect waves, and a great book.

--Amy Feitelberg

We're Touched By the Thought

Former SNL funnyman Chris Elliot has just published a new book called "Into Hot Air: Mounting Mount Everest," a send-up of Outside Editor at Large Jon Krakauer's famous work of nearly the same name. The book imagines it wasn't Hillary and Tenzing Norgay who first bagged Everest's summit, but Elliot's adventurous and stone-crazy Great Uncle Percy Brackett Elliott, who subsequently disappeared. Hoping to solve the mystery, Elliot the younger sets off to hike the mountain with a cast of characters including Michael Moore, Martin Sheen, Kirsten Dunst and Tony Danza. Entertainment Weekly's says: "Think Caleb Carr meets Monty Python." Thanks for thinking of us, Chris.
--Damon Tabor

Movie Review: God Grew Tired of Us

You've heard, no doubt, of the group of African refugees known as "The Lost Boys of the Sudan." To escape their country’s savage civil war, which took more than 500,000 lives between 1983 and 2005 and displaced millions, some 25,000 kids—mostly male, ages three to 13—left their families and villages and spent years trekking hundreds of miles, barefoot, across the sub-Saharan desert. While many died along the way, thousands eventually found safety in refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda.

The statistics are sad and shocking. But they tend to get lost in the shuffle in a world where war and suffering are so common they’re no longer necessarily front-page news. I can pretty much promise that if you watch God Grew Tired of Us ($25; www.godgrewtiredofus.com) the Sundance-award-winning documentary which hits DVD today from Sony Pictures, the Lost Boys and their story will stick in your head. (Watch a preview of the film below).

God Grew Tired of Us follows three Sudanese boys—now 20- and 30-somethings, actually—who spent ten years in the U.N.’s Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya, until a relocation program sponsored by the U.S. government, the U.N., and various aid groups helped them start new lives in the United States in 2001. John Bul Dau was sent to Syracuse, New York, while Daniel Pach and Panther Bior moved to Pittsburgh; we watch as they leave their friends in Kenya, bravely board a plane for America, and experience such wonders as hot-water showers, electricity on demand, and store aisles filled with fresh produce and packaged junk food. We also watch as, over the next four years, they work double-shift jobs, struggle to understand and fit into American culture, and worry about the fate of the families they left behind in Sudan. Food is more plentiful, they have roofs over the heads, and they’re living in a peaceful society. But it’s clear that life isn’t easy now for the Sudanese refugees; it’s just different.

Nicole Kidman narrates—an attempt, obviously, to lend some Hollywood appeal to the production—and Brad Pitt is listed as an executive producer, but the stars here are the Sudanese men who persevere after years of unfathomable hardship. Their reactions to the novelties of American life (flushable toilets, with seats that close!) lend some lightness to the film, which is serious but somehow never a complete downer. A few critics, in fact, have bashed it for glossing over the atrocities that took place in Sudan 20 years ago. But this compelling film explains more, I’m guessing, than most Americans (myself included) ever knew about the Sudanese people who came to America in the early 2000s—and it sheds light on what Sudan's latest refugees, fleeing violence in the country's Darfur region, are going through today.—Dianna Delling

Jon Krakauer's Favorite Books

At Outside, we've been reading (and publishing) Jon Karakauer for years (he first wrote for the magazine in 1981). So it was nice to flip open Newsweek this week to see what Jon has been reading all this time. Newsweek asked him to name the most important books on his shelf.

The list:

1) The Dead Father, by Donald Barthelme. Krakauer called it "a breathakingly original meditation on the volatile bond between father and sons."
2) Against Love, by Laura Kipnis
3) House, by Tracy Kidder. "It made me yearn to to become an accomplished writer," Jon told Newsweek.
4) The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm
5) For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard. In the piece, Jon calls it "the most engaging book I've encountered about the nature of evil..."

(He forgot Into Thin Air, but we won't hold that against him.)

Jon also gave props to Principia Mathematica, (Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell) which he says is actually read by only one of every 20 people who claim they've have read it. (We admit, we had to Google that one).

Jon's pick for the most disappointing classic? In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Jon told Newsweek, "After I learned of his boast that he wrote all the dialogue from memory, much of it struck me as having been invented."

--Justin Nyberg