NEWSHOUR BOOKSHELF - "A Train Through Time"

"For a veteran NewsHour journalist, an early loss defined her life's journeys" PBS NewsHour 3/23/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Elizabeth Farnsworth traveled the world for years as a foreign correspondent for the NewsHour.  Her new book, A Train Through Time, examines her experiences in hotspots such as Latin America.  But it's more than a story of her reporting, as she details her childhood and the loss of her mother, and also blends fact with fiction.  Farnsworth sits down with Jeffrey Brown to discuss her work.

MEDIA - Importance of Literature

"Peruvian Writer Mario Vargas Llosa on the Importance of Literature" PBS Newshour 6/1/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the world's leading writers, speaks with Jeffrey Brown about his new book and how he folds history and contemporary politics into his writing.

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa told his audience a story -- his own.

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA: Once upon a time, there was a boy who learned to read at the age of 5. This changed his life. Owing to the adventure tales he read, he discovered a way to escape from the poor house, the poor country, and the poor reality in which he lived.

JEFFREY BROWN: The acclaimed storyteller, one of the most celebrated writers in the Spanish-speaking world and beyond, learned from the tales of others.

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA: Reading was such an enrichment of my life. And it was that pleasure that I had as a very young reader probably that is the origin of my vocation.

LATIN AMERICA - Spanish Language Nobel Winner

"Vargas Llosa Takes Nobel in Literature" by JULIE BOSMAN and SIMON ROMERO, New York Times 10/7/2010

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The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa, 74, is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, an anti-totalitarian intellectual whose work covers the range of human experience, whether it is ideology or eros. He is frequently mentioned with his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, who won the literature Nobel in 1982, the last South American to do so. Mr. Vargas Llosa has written more than 30 works of nonfiction, plays and novels, including “The Feast of the Goat” and “The War of the End of the World.”

The prize is the first for a writer in the Spanish language in two decades, after Octavio Paz of Mexico won in 1990. It renews attention on the Latin American writers who gained renown in the 1960s, like Julio Cortázar of Argentina and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, who formed the region’s “boom generation.”

During a news conference at the Instituto Cervantes in Manhattan on Thursday, Mr. Vargas Llosa, an elegant, dashing figure with silvery hair, appeared in front of a crowd of giddy journalists, mostly Spanish-speaking, and Alejandro Toledo, the former president of Peru, who sat in the front row. Mr. Vargas Llosa is currently spending the semester in the United States, teaching Latin American studies at Princeton.