| Robert Rosenstone reads Red Star, Crescent Moon |
|
|
|
|
Thursday, September 23 2010, 7:30pm
|
|
 Robert Rosenstone reads and signs his novel Red Star, Crescent Moon: A Muslim-Jewish Love Story. Robert A. Rosenstone’s King of Odessa was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “an astonishingly confident first novel from a historian with a whole new career ahead of him,” and chosen by Barnes and Noble as part of its Great New Writers Series. Now with the appearance of Red Star, Crescent Moon – A Muslim Jewish Love Story, the esteemed historian fulfills the promise of that earlier work as he again mixes the contemporary and the historical in a bold tale of clashing cultures.
Red Star, Crescent Moon is set in Spain against the vibrant and colorful background of a women’s film festival, the on location shoot of a Hollywood epic, the seductive activities of a movie star known as The Most Beautiful Man in the World, and the actions of terrorists who wish to reclaim that country for Islam.
Soon after documentary director, Aisha, arrives in Spain to screen her film on the Afghans in America, she meets Benjamin, whose book on the Spanish Civil War is being shot near Madrid. The two are pulled to each other despite – or is it because of? --- the great differences in their backgrounds. This is more than a matter of religion. Aisha has lived through major historical traumas while Benjamin has only written about them. As a student she was caught in a civil war in Lebanon; later her family was scattered by foreign invasion. The closest Benjamin has ever come to military activity was six months of training with the US Army.
When at the screening of Aisha’s documentary, an Islamic militant makes an angry protest against the film, the resulting political and media frenzy turn her into an instant celebrity and a target of radical Islamists. To help her escape an intrusive world, Benjamin must tear himself away from his own personal and professional problems with the Hollywood star turned director, and when that world becomes deadly serious, he must face the question of whether the historian is capable of undertaking actions which create history.
Told in multiple voices, Red Star, Crescent Moon confronts some of the major cultural and political dilemmas of our time, creating a world of characters caught in webs of historical misunderstanding. Embedded within the story is a meditation on the meaning of the past, how we depict and remember it, how our histories shape us, how traditions at once create and limit our identities and our feelings for other human beings and cultures.
Author Bio
A professor of history at the California Institute of Technology, Robert A. Rosenstone has published a dozen books of history, criticism, memoir, and fiction, including a novel, King of Odessa, based on the life of Russian Jewish writer, Isaac Babel, and The Man Who Swam into History: The (Mostly) True Story of my Jewish Family. He is author of Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975), used in part as the basis of the Academy Award winning film, Reds, on which he served as historical consultant. Among his other scholarly works are Crusade of the Left, a history of the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War; Mirror in the Shrine, a multi-voice, experimental historical narrative about Westerners in 19th century Japan; Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History, and History on Film / Film on History (2006). |
Back
|
Calendar
