Historians/History

Inspired by John Gunther: An Interview with Mark Weisenmiller

by Aaron Leonard

Florida-based reporter and HNN alumnus Mark Weisenmiller is completing a nonfiction book about Africa, the Near East, and the European countries encircling the Mediterranean Sea. The book will be published in 2010. HNN contributor Aaron Leonard recently conducted an ‘e-interview’ with him about the book.

What inspired you to write this?

Since boyhood, the “Inside” books by John Gunther have been a source of inspiration for me and I always wanted to attempt a similar nonfiction literary project. Traveling and reporting from almost 40 different countries in my reporting career has served as a base, if you will, for this project. I plan to make this book the first of a series of nonfiction tomes, profiling different areas and countries of the world. In the subsequent books, the main editorial focuses will be, like this book, politics and history.

The Mediterranean in a sense joins man's different worlds; what are the most striking differences among the countries you profile?

The most obvious difference is the domination of Islam in the African and Near Eastern countries, and the dominance of Christianity in the European countries. This is reflected not only in the religious theologies (obviously) but also how different aspects of these theologies intermingle and trickle down to everything in the countries populace lives, from what kind of jobs they have to even what they eat.

What is it these countries share?

This may be rather simplistic, but what these profiled countrys' populaces share is a desire for their respective countries to have healthy, robust economies and for people to have jobs. The editorial spine of this book, if you will, are the subjects of politics and history of the profiled countries. Something Alistair Cooke (another author/reporter) once wrote really struck me when I first read it, “ Politics will undoubtedly bedevil us all till the day we die, but it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off those things for which we were presumably designed in the first place: I mean the opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to read, to hit a ball, and to bounce the baby.”

That is really true, isn’t it ? For a person to be really happy---whether he or she lives in any of this books profiled countries, or any other country---an over-abundance of materialistic goods is unnecessary but a job and some form of shelter for a person IS mandatory.

Another thing that these countries share is that many of them have political leaders who have been in power for many years: King Mohammed VI of Morocco; Libya’s President Colonel Moammar Gadhafi; President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi---the list goes on and on.

In the January, 2010 edition of “Esquire” magazine, biographer and historian Robert Caro said “ When you examine power, you are examining the very roots of why the world is where it is.” Caro’s quote gets to some of the questions that I will be trying to answer. To wit: Who are the political leaders of the world ? WHY are they the political leaders of the world? What are they trying to do in their capacities as leaders of the world? Finally, who are some of the up-and-coming potential political leaders of the world ?

What areas were the most difficult to write about?

One problem that I wish I could overcome, in doing research for this book, is that I do not read, write, or speak Arabic and for many of this book’s profiled countries, Arabic is the chief, or in some cases the official, language. It would be fun to be able to read Arabic-language books that have been written about some of these countries but, unfortunately, such is not going to be the case with this book.

So, at least for me, there is not one country more difficult than another in this book to write about. Rather, as I am doing all of my research for this book, the basic problem is deciding which reference books and resources, and other sources, to use and which ones to ignore.

After doing all this what is your level of skepticism and optimism about these varied countries and their place on this modest planet?

I am leery of countries whose leaders think that they can pursue a policy of belligerent nationalism. History shows that this particular political theory simply does not guarantee perpetual power, whether it be the Roman Empire or Nazi Germany.

As for optimism, in some regions of the world countries are pulling out of this so-called Great Recession. If you stop and think about it, when the world was really sunk deep in this gumbo morass of economic problems, that would have been excellent cause for people living in this book’s profiled countries, as well as people living in other countries of the world, to revolt, to try to create political parties devoted to toppling governments. I have often wondered why this did not, or has not happened in large numbers.

So, despite overwhelming surface evidence to the contrary, one must be optimistic about politicians and people trying hard to think of ideas to better both their countries economies and also their own social status. To put it another way, optimism eventually leads to answers in solving problems, while devout pessimism (which has always seemed to me to be an intellectual cop-out) leads to stomach ulcers.