Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK in Southern California: TOM ZOELLNER. Reporter and nonfiction writer Zoellner, a native Arizonan, has written a sincere, honest, provocative, book bound to be a major contribution to popular literature about ourselves, our nation, our responsibility to understand each other. A Safeway in Arizona tells the story of the shooting of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords by a mentally ill gun owner, of life in Arizona --- with its flimsy economic model built on get rich quick real estate schemes, anti-immigrant politics, weird elected officials --- and also of some brave and beautiful people, including Giffords and Zoellner himself, struggling to make something like democracy out of the state’s singularly difficult history. A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tell us about the Grand Canyon State and Life in America is a startling and moving book about the people who make our politics, about loss and violence but also about struggle and commitment. It reminded this reader of DJ Waldie’s Holy Land, about Lakewood, California, for its ambitious and heartfelt personal meditation meets socio-political study. Zoellner is author of Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, winner of the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award; The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire; co-author of An Ordinary Man. He has worked as a reporter for The Arizona Republic and San Francisco Chronicle and is Associate Professor of English at Chapman University. Read his commentary in today’s Los Angeles Times at: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0111-zoellner-arizona-20120111,0,3544601.story. Thanks for listening, live on the radio, online or downloadable, free, for 90 days from the KPFK audio archives.
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