We Are What We Think…and Eat
Dear Friends,
Welcome to October’s Substack.
I hope you’ll enjoy this month’s blog We Are What We Think…and Eat. The audio version is available by clicking the link in the blog or clicking the link here for all podcasts. https://joanneleedomackerman.substack.com/podcast
Book News shares appearances, awards, interviews, and information on my novels, including an October e-book deal for Burning Distance, only $0.99 on Kindle, Nook and other e-book readers and the paperback publication of The Far Side of the Desert.
The Writers at Risk section focuses on Indian academic and writer Hany Babu who has spent five years in pre-trial detention without even a bail hearing. Also noted is the good news about the release of Egyptian writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah featured in June’s Substack.
The Books to Check Out section heralds John le Carré’s masterpiece A Perfect Spy and in a different mode, a television series White Collar.
In the Scene section you’ll find a photo, along with text from Burning Distance, and in Words of the Month a couple of words you may not use but might like to know, one from John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy.
Thank you to everyone who has come to bookstores, libraries, book clubs and online for my latest novels Burning Distance and The Far Side of the Desert. Word of mouth is what sells books, connecting them to readers. Thank you for spreading the word!
If you’re interested in having me speak at a venue or with a book club, click here. Thank you too for reading and sharing this free monthly Substack On the Yellow Brick Road. I hope you’ll stay in touch!
We Are What We Think…and Eat
Walking down a familiar stretch of M Street in Georgetown in Washington DC, I noticed a new restaurant among the surrounding restaurants, all featuring foods from different regions of the world side by side in this half block—France, Afghanistan, India and an “Asian grill.” A half mile away are Mexican restaurants and across the street Ethiopian and Vietnamese restaurants. In this small neighborhood can be found restaurants with their chefs and staffs from most regions of the world.
The rich culinary offerings represent a heritage we have as Americans. Most of us at one point in our families’ histories came from immigrants arriving on the shore of this country that promised “liberty and justice for all.” Some began by starting restaurants with the food from their home countries.
America receives immigrants from 112 countries, according to 2016 statistics, a factor that has countered the declining population rates seen in many countries like Russia. U.S. immigration policy, however, continues to be debated and remains unresolved. Most Americans agree there need to be rational, enforceable immigration limits but with humane enforcement. Yet enforcement in the past year has never been as harsh and unwelcoming nor the national discourse as contentious, at least in my lifetime.
The discordant rhetoric also seeps into personal lives. I recently had conversations, one with an octogenarian, one with a young teenager—both included sentences beginning with a passionate “I hate…” The object of one was a political personage; the other a contemporary.
However justified hatred may seem, it doesn’t lead to the society we want to live in or to the actions that will build and benefit. Countering hatred can seem difficult, especially if the offense seems personal or existential, but hatred is a false foundation that cannot bear the weight of living. Hatred is as corrosive as any drug or poison or weapon to a person and to a society.
Hatred is countered thought by thought and action by action. Kindness, generosity, even if not reciprocated and even if not necessarily directed at the object of hate, can begin to fill thought and to crowd the hatred out.
I’m honored that The Far Side of the Desert (Oceanview Publishing) was recently named as a finalist in the Suspense category for the 2025 National Indie Excellence Awards. The novel was also awarded the 2025 Bronze medal in the Suspense/Thriller category by the Independent Publishers Association (IPPY) Book Awards.
Published in 2024, The Far Side of the Desert was released in paperback April, 2025. I hope you’ll order, read and enjoy. If you’ve already read the hardcover, I hope you’ll buy the paperback and give to friends!
“The Far Side of the Desert is that rare story – a literary work and a first-rate thriller. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, who has traveled the world advocating for human rights, is one of the few writers today who can construct a superb and complex international spy novel. The Far Side of the Desert is stellar.”
—Jennifer Clement, former President of PEN International and award-winning novelist of Prayers for the Stolen, Gun Love, The Promised Party and The Widow Basquiat.
Burning Distance is currently available for purchase in ebook format for only $0.99 through October 31.
Burning Distance (Oceanview Publishing, 2023 and paperback in 2024) was honored by the 2024 American Book Fest International Book Awards as a Finalist in the Best Mystery/Suspense and Thriller/Adventure categories.
“I entered the world of Burning Distance, and I didn’t want to leave. The narrative voice unfolds the story both poetically and realistically. The narrative opens for the reader some of the history that has taken us to the current events in the Middle East and Europe and America. But first and foremost the reader will want to read Burning Distance to know the characters.”
—Azar Nafisi, best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and Read Dangerously
Thanks to Monica Hadley and Writers Voices for the recent interview about The Far Side of the Desert. You can listen here.
Selected recordings of past events and interviews:
Interview with Monica Hadley, Writers Voices
Strategies for Living Podcast: Finding Resilience Through Story
Interview with Janeane Bernstein on NPR’s KUCI, Get the Funk Out!
Book Launch for Akram Aylisli's People and Trees with Plamen Press
Why Baldwin Matters Series, The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center
Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café in Asheville, NC
Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York City with Salil Tripathi
Baum on Books on WSHU Public Radio
Interview with Anna Roins of Authorlink
Interview with Deborah Kalb
For more podcasts, videos and interviews, click here
Hany Babu (India)
(Sources include PEN International, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and The Wire India)
Hany Babu, an English professor at Delhi University, has languished in prison without a hearing for bail and without trial for five years. He has been charged, along with other noted Dalit and Adivasi rights activists, for allegedly inciting caste-based violence through speeches at a rally in December 2017 which authorities said led to violent clashes the next day. He wasn’t arrested, however, until July 2020 when he and others were also accused of being members of the banned Communist Party of India.
Babu was charged with over a dozen offenses including "promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony," and public mischief.
“It is really horrific that a university professor is languishing in jail for so many years without a trial, without having done any specific crime even according to the charge sheet and based only on the documents found in his computer, which was taken away in a raid by the police before his arrest without following any procedures,” protested his wife Jenny Rowena, also a professor at Delhi University.
“My academic writings and research were almost wiped clean when the Pune police came and took away my electronic devices,” Babu writes in a letter to his family. According to a report in The Wire India, the police took the passwords of all his emails, cloud accounts, and shut him out, making all his data and research work inaccessible.
His arrest was in the middle of the Covid pandemic, and he was “quarantined” in a solitary cell as a new prisoner with no access to books, pen and paper. When these were finally given to him, he said “his happiness knew no bounds. Writing, in a place like prison, is the only outlet you have at times,” he said in one of his letters.
His writings have long shown an interest in social justice. In one letter, reprinted in The Wire India, he recalls how he always had interest in law and human rights. He was part of a team that worked on behalf of a colleague 90% disabled and wheelchair-bound who was arrested in 2014 under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). His colleague was finally released from jail ten years later but within months died of complications that had developed because of his incarceration.
According to Human Rights Watch, “The Indian authorities are increasingly bringing politically motivated cases, including under severe sedition and terrorism laws, against critics of the government.”
Since 2018, Indian authorities have arrested 16 activists under anti-terror law in connection with the Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad case. Nine of them, including Hany Babu, remain in prison without trial. These activists include poets, journalists, lawyers, professors, artists, and a Jesuit priest who peacefully exercised their rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association, according to Amnesty International.
“Babu’s five years in pre-trial detention are a gross injustice and a stark example of how India’s primary counterterrorism legislation has been weaponized to silence dissenting voices,” notes PEN International.
Babu is currently at Taloja Central Jail, Navi Mumbai.
To Take Action for Hany Babu :
Urge the Indian authorities to:
Drop all charges and immediately release Hany Babu
Pending release, ensure that Babu is granted prompt, regular, and unrestricted access to care and other basic necessities
Repeal or substantially amend the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
Send Appeals to:
Union Home Minister of India
Amit Shah
Ministry of Home Affairs
North Block, New Delhi - 110001 India
hm@mha.gov.in
https://www.facebook.com/HMOfficeIndia/
@HMOIndia
@hmoindia
Please send emails to the Embassy of India in in your own country.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah from Egypt was released from prison in September after five years. For more details on his case see June 2025 Substack profile. Freedom of expression organizations, including PEN, worked for his release. Pictured here with his mother and sister.
An attack on a writer, the shutting down of a publishing house, the torching of a newspaper reduce the space in the world where ideas can flow. Freedom of expression is vital to writers and to readers but is challenged daily around the world. Listed here are organizations whose work on human rights and in particular issues of freedom of expression I’ve been engaged with directly and indirectly over the years. Some of the organizations have broader agendas, but all have contributed to keeping space open for the individual voice.
PEN International (with its 147 centers in over 100 countries)
PEN American Center
English PEN
PEN/Faulkner Foundation
Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International
Amnesty International USA
International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX)
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Article 19
Index on Censorship
Poets and Writers
Authors Guild
International Center for Journalists
Among my reading gaps in the spy/thriller category was John le Carré’s novel A Perfect Spy which I finally read in September. The novel stunned me with its artistry, its nuanced storytelling, its breadth and heart and political savvy. Heralded as his masterpiece, it is also, I agree, one of the great novels of the last half of the twentieth century as others have said and one of the truly great spy novels.
In this column I usually pair books that have a common element, but I found it difficult to find a novel I’d recently read to profile along with A Perfect Spy so I’m taking a different path and profiling a television series which I’ve now watched twice and which has the similar elements of perfect pitch, heart, narrative suspense, and the character of a sympathetic con artist at the center. I don’t watch that much television, but this series was recommended to me by one of my sons. It hit my mark balancing suspense, entertainment and characters I cared about. Premiering in 2009 and running through 2014, White Collar is over a decade old. A Perfect Spy was published in 1986, almost 40 years ago. So this October Substack is a journey back to the future.
A Perfect Spy cuts back and forth in time and place with a multi-generational narrative of father and son, the one a con artist, the other a spy and the son/grandson as the audience and beneficiary or victim of their actions and lives. At one point Magnus Pym tells his son, “You see, Tom, I am the bridge…I am what you must walk over to get from Rick to life.” Rick, the charming conman grandfather, has been his own agent toiling for King and country and mostly for himself.
Autobiographical, A Perfect Spy leans heavily on le Carré’s life as the son of a confessed conman who traveled the world and society charming people and politicians and on more than one occasion relieving them of their fortunes and their secrets.
Set in the aftermath of World War 2 as Europe was coming to terms with its Communist neighbors, in particular Czechoslovakia, A Perfect Spy reveals the tradecraft of the spy, including the ambiguities and relationships of the spy and his “Joes.” The frame of the narrative unfolds after Rick has died and his son Magnus disappears off the grid. Her Majesty’s service becomes concerned that Magnus has defected and gone to the other side where he has a compelling relationship with Herr Axel, a Czech agent.
The novel’s strength is not just the complex plot and the political hijinks but the intricate relationships of family and the voices of the characters who reveal themselves largely through dialogue and through the language le Carré brings to each character in the telling of his story.
From A Perfect Spy:
No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so openhearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, share them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axel’s service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-seventies be had for a few coppers from the Washington Post. We could have resented this sometimes, if we had been smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a great scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in Aviation Weekly the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again.
Cameos, Tom, little tiles for your mosaic are all I need to give you now. See the two friends romping under a darkening sky, catching the last rays of the sunlight before the game is over. See them thieving like children, knowing the police are round the corner. Pym did not take to America in a night, not in a month, for all the splendid fireworks of the Fourth. His love of the place grew with Axel’s. Without Axel he might never have seen the light. Pym set out, believe it or not, determined to disapprove of everything he saw. He found no holding point, no stern judgment to revolt against. These vulgar pleasure-seeking people, so frank and clamorous, were too uninhibited for his shielded and involuted life. They loved their prosperity too obviously, were too flexible and mobile, too little the slaves of place, origin and class. They had no sense of that hush which all Pym’s life had been the background music of his inhibition. In committee, it was true, they reverted soon enough to type, and became the warring princelings of the European countries they had left behind. They could run you up a cabal that would make mediaeval Venice blush. They could be Dutch and stubborn, Scandinavian and gloomy, Balkan and murderous and tribal. But when they mixed with one another they were American and loquacious and disarming, and Pym was hard put to find a centre to betray.
Running for six seasons, White Collar created, written and produced by Jeff Eastin, offers viewers an intricate crime creatively solved in each episode and holds the viewers with an overarching story to solve and characters in a constant state of amicable tension. The characters like and care about each other even if they don’t entirely trust each other. Peter Burke (Tim DeKay), Special Agent in charge of the FBI’s New York City White Collar division, his highly intelligent and charming criminal informant Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer), Burke’s smart and loving wife Elizabeth (Tiffani Thiessen) and Caffrey’s wily, brilliant sidekick Mozzie (Willie Garson)and a cast of complex and beguiling characters anchor the show and the audience.
Tension abides between the con and the law man and the limits of the law in exacting justice and arbitrating between humanity, human error and crime. The imaginative scripts and the spot-on performances with characters who care will make viewers hope the prospective “reboot” of White Collar will soon come to show. White Collar can currently be seen on Netflix and Hulu/Disney+.
Sharing here image and passage of text from Burning Distance:
“I have something I want to give you. When Jack said he saw you, I thought, Lizzy will know what to do. You once told me you knew someone who could help.”
“Help with what?” A horn honks. “Where are you?”
“In a phone booth on the street. I’ve got to get back. Can we meet tomorrow? At Sticky Fingers. Gerald hates that place so there’s no chance he’ll come there. In the afternoon, around four?”
Over the years I’ve accumulated a running list of words I haven’t known from two main sources: WordDaily and WordGenius.
Misprision
[misˈpriZH(ə)n]
Part of speech: noun
contempt or scorn
a neglect or violation of official duty by one in office
failure by one not an accessory to prevent or notify the authorities of treason or felony
a contempt against the government, monarch, or courts, as sedition, lese majesty, or a contempt of court
a mistake; misunderstanding.
Examples:
Poet Marge Piercy noted in her memoir that her life "has been full of blunders, misprisions, accidents, losses."
She was charged with misprision of a felony for deleting security footage to protect her brother.
He was guilty of misprision of treason for not revealing the plot to overthrow the government.
Jackdaw
[jack·daw]
Part of speech: noun
Jackdaws are two species of bird in the genus Coloeus closely related to, but generally smaller than, crows and ravens (Corvus).
Example:
“He’s got a pet jackdaw that looks just like him.” From John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy
I’ve spoken at bookstores, university classes, book luncheons and in-person and zoom book clubs and look forward to more ahead. I enjoy giving readings and addressing audiences in many venues and moderating discussions on a wide range of topics and most of all meeting readers.
Click here for a list of future and past public events.
Or fill out the speaking request form to schedule an event.
I like engaging with readers so if you are in a Reading Group or Book Club and read one of my books, I’m glad to be in touch by email, zoom, or when possible in person. I can also suggest discussion topics.
Fill out the reading group form here to schedule a meeting.
Wonderful message about where we eat in relation to who we are. Thank you!
Dear Joanne, Congratulations on all the accolades! I love this book!