On her book My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File
Cover Interview of January 23, 2019
A close-up
I tried to finesse this question by putting the most
important things at the beginning: a surveillance photo of myself in my
underwear, a preface beginning with the sentence I quoted in question 1, and a
brief account of how I came to resemble a spy early in my work because I rode
my motorbike into a military base.
Other than these, among my favorite passages is the section
in which I describe what life was like during my research trip in the
austerity-driven years 1984-85 (pp. 139-50), including some jokes people were
telling at the time and some splendid stories about how people struggled to
make ends meet. I like this passage because it shows Romanians’ marvelous
capacity to face adversity with humor, a trait that caused me to return over
and over to that wonderful country despite its ugly government under Nicolae
Ceausescu. Another favorite is the passage that includes my conversations with
a friend I call Mariana (pp. 233-244), which I think shows the complexity of a
person’s becoming an informer for the secret police and some of the
psychological complexities of their doing so.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
A close-up
I tried to finesse this question by putting the most important things at the beginning: a surveillance photo of myself in my underwear, a preface beginning with the sentence I quoted in question 1, and a brief account of how I came to resemble a spy early in my work because I rode my motorbike into a military base.
Other than these, among my favorite passages is the section in which I describe what life was like during my research trip in the austerity-driven years 1984-85 (pp. 139-50), including some jokes people were telling at the time and some splendid stories about how people struggled to make ends meet. I like this passage because it shows Romanians’ marvelous capacity to face adversity with humor, a trait that caused me to return over and over to that wonderful country despite its ugly government under Nicolae Ceausescu. Another favorite is the passage that includes my conversations with a friend I call Mariana (pp. 233-244), which I think shows the complexity of a person’s becoming an informer for the secret police and some of the psychological complexities of their doing so.