IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair. We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
Lauren Collins profiles Serbian Novak Djokovic, tennis player extraordinaire, who is as well known for his funny behaviour off the court as on, from picking up on current trends to making the most of this time in the spotlight. (The New Yorker) (Approx 40 minutes reading time – 8168 words)
He bounces the ball a million times before he serves. His play is plasmatic. He seems to flow toward the corners of the court. He is an origami man, folding at the waist to dig up a drop shot, starfishing for a high forehand return, cocking his leg behind his head in an arabesque as he blasts a backhand down the line. He lunges, he dives, he beats his pecs. He once yelled—in Serbian—“Now you all will suck my d**k!”
David Remnick travels to the world’s second-largest refugee camp, in Jordan, to meet with the people who call the jumble of hand-made tents home. Everyone there, he says, is dispossessed, but people retain their pride. (The New Yorker) (Approx 36 minutes reading time – 7283 words)
When Za’atari opened, in July of 2012, its population numbered in the hundreds. By late August, it had fifteen thousand residents. Now that number is a hundred and twenty thousand—the population of Hartford, Connecticut, or Santa Clara, California. The main drag is on the western side of the camp, a boulevard of ramshackle shops, makeshift clinics, schools. The smells are city smells: sewage, sweat, cigarette smoke, eau de cologne, meat roasting on spits. The boulevard is known to the Syrians and the aid workers as the Champs-Élysées.
Alexander Litvinenko. Pic: AP Photo/Alistair Fuller
3. Finding my mother in the Amazon
William Kremer tells the incredible story of David Good, whose father was from the US and mother was a member of an Amazonian tribe. Though in many ways it is complicated story, raising questions about anthropology, culture, and boundaries being crossed, at the heart of it is the story of a man who loves his mother and wants to be reunited with her. (BBC News) (Approx 30 minutes reading time – 6042 words)
It was as a graduate student of Chagnon's that David Good's father, Kenneth Good, first travelled to the Amazon in 1975. He travelled up the Orinoco past the Guajaribo Rapids, just as his son did 36 years later. He made his home in a little hut a short distance from the Hasupuweteri. The plan was to stay for 15 months of fieldwork, measuring the animal protein intake of all the village members.
Will Storr delves into the story of what happened to Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident who was poisoned at the age of 43. Storr details what occurred after the poison was slipped into Litvinenko's tea one afternoon, and why someone wanted to kill him. (Matter) (Approx 44 minutes reading time – 8893 words)
That muscular grip alerted Henry to a potential problem in the diagnosis. How could Litvinenko be so physically strong? Why wasn’t his energy dissolving away? Goldfarb showed the full toxicology report to Henry. “It says here that the level of thallium is elevated, but only three times over the norm,” Henry said. “This is too low to account for the symptoms.” In his opinion, the hospital physicians had been misled by that mysterious signal. Something else was at play.
Paul Solotaroff introduces us to Aaron Hernandez: NFL player, tough man, and a guy who could have been a contender... if it wasn't for the drugs, guns and violence he couldn't keep away from. Fascinating, no matter what your interest in American Football. (Rolling Stone) (Approx 38 minutes reading time – 7697 words)
When Lloyd went back upstairs, Hernandez was enraged. Club security cameras allegedly capture the two men squabbling, showing Hernandez, six-two and a rippled 250, facing off with the five-11 Lloyd. The friends stopped short of throwing punches, though cameras mounted outside the club show the argument resuming in the street.
Jon Kelly looks at the Bristol bus boycott, which led to the overturning of a ban on ethnic minorities working on the city's buses. It was 1963, when race relations were strained and unequal, and it was commonplace for people to be prevented from doing something simply because of their colour. (BBC News) (Approx 23 minutes reading time – 4743 words)
Bailey recalls his shock, not long after he first came to Bristol in 1961, when he was chased by gangs of Teddy Boys wielding bicycle chains, their blows landing on the back of his head as he ran. For a young man raised in Jamaica by a fervently monarchist British Army veteran father, this went against everything he had been brought up to expect of the place he knew as the "mother country".
...AND A CLASSIC READ FROM THE ARCHIVES…
All Action/EMPICS Entertainment
In 1982, Greil Marcus interviewed the bespectacled Elvis Costell0, pop star with a rock and roll swagger, about his career to date. During a five-hour conversation around the time of the release of Costello's eighth album, the men discussed his childhood, beloved bands, and unemployment. (Rolling Stone) (Approx 30 minutes reading time – 6073 words)
I actually "saw the light" when I was already playing – coming back to London, seeing a lot of groups, Nick Lowe and the Brinsleys, pub-rock groups. I think you get very earnest when you're about sixteen to eighteen, and everyone at school was listening either to the psychedelic groups or singer/songwriters: it was all very earnest, pouring out your inner soul. In London I discovered that all the music I liked secretly, that I'd been hiding from my friends – that was what was great fun in a bar: Lee Dorsey songs! Suddenly it was all right to like it; that was when I saw the light. There was nothing wrong with it.
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