Brooks, Geraldine 1956(?)–

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Brooks, Geraldine 1956(?)–

PERSONAL: Born c. 1956, in Sydney, Australia; married Tony Horowitz (a journalist), 1984; children: Nathaniel. Education: Columbia University, M.J., 1983; Sydney University, graduate. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Home—Waterford, VA; Sydney, Australia. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Viking Publicity, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014.

CAREER: Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia, former reporter; Wall Street Journal, London, England, Middle Eastern correspondent, 1988–c. 1997; United Nations, New York, NY, correspondent, 1993–94; writer, c. 1997–.

AWARDS, HONORS: Hal Boyle Award, Overseas Press Club of America, 1990, for the best daily newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad; Kibble Award, Australia, 1998, for Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over; Impac Award shortlist for Year of Wonder.

WRITINGS:

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (nonfiction), Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1995.

(With Margaret Courtney-Clarke) Imazighen: The Vanishing Traditions of Berber Women, Clarkson Potter Publishers (New York, NY), 1996.

Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over (memoir), Anchor Books/Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, Viking (New York, NY), 2001.

March (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Author and journalist Geraldine Brooks (not to be confused with Geraldine Brooks the film and stage actress) has won awards for her coverage of the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal, including reports on the Persian Gulf War. She channels a unique part of that experience into her first nonfiction book, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. When Brooks first arrived in the Middle East she felt cut off, as a female correspondent, from much of Muslim society. She turned that liability into an advantage when she donned the hijab (the black veil worn by most Muslim women in the Middle East) and thereby enabled herself to penetrate the cloistered world of Muslim women.

The title of Nine Parts of Desire comes from an interpretation of the Q'uran offered by the Shiite branch: "Almighty God created sexual desires in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men." As Laura Shapiro, writing for Newsweek, commented: "Good enough reason to keep women under wraps." Brooks uncovers a complex picture in her investigation of Muslim women's lives that goes beyond the Western assumption of women's oppression and isolation from public life.

Brooks interviewed a wide range of Muslim women, from belly dancers to housewives, and from activists to female army recruits; her list of interviewees includes Queen Noor of Jordan and Ayatollah Khomeini's daughter. Her discoveries are fascinating and wide-ranging, if sometimes contradictory, according to reviewers. Booklist contributor Mary Ellen Sullivan wrote that, according to Brooks, sexual gratification is considered "an inherent right" for Muslim women, but genital mutilation is still a common practice. It may surprise some Americans to read that women fare better in Iran than in the rest of the Middle East. Brooks explains: "To Muslim women elsewhere … the Iranian woman riding to work on her motorbike, even with her billowing chador gripped firmly in her teeth, looks like a figure of envy." By wearing the chador herself, Brooks discovers a camaraderie among the women that she has experienced elsewhere, as when she bakes bread with Kurdish women. But when she notices a young boy sampling bits of bread that his sister sweats to make, she sees the negative side of strict sexual divisions as well: "His sister, not much older, was already part of our bread-making assembly line. Why should he learn so young that her role was to toil for his pleasure?"

Sullivan called Brooks "a wonderful writer and thinker," noting that her study gives readers new insight into the lives of Muslim women. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book a "powerful and enlightening report" that brings Westerners much closer to the reality of Muslim life for women. Shapiro admired the firsthand reporting that led Brooks to an "intimacy with these women [that] made it impossible either to romanticize or to demonize the tradition that ruled them."

A few years later, Brooks followed her first book with Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over, a memoir of her childhood that focuses on the importance of foreign pen pals to her sense of an independent identity and freedom from what she then considered the boring backwater of her hometown, Sydney, Australia. The frame of the narrative is the approaching death of Brooks's father, which brings her back to Sydney from her life as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. While going through family papers, she finds letters from pen pals—from as far as the United States, France, and Israel—she had long ago forgotten. Rereading these letters brings her back to her youthful sense of restlessness and early belief that "real life happened in far-off lands." During her childhood and adolescence, the pen pals fulfilled her yearning for the exotic, and gave a sense of breaking away, as Donna Seaman commented in Booklist, from "Australia's mid-century, Anglo-focused insularity." The experience was formative in bringing Brooks to her position as a traveling journalist and "fireman" for the Wall Street Journal (the term identifies journalists who can report on controversial subjects and issues). Brooks's rereading of the letters inspired her to look up her old pen pals, among them Joannie, her pen pal from the United States who spent the summer in Switzerland and Martha's Vineyard, but whose glamorous-sounding life ended early from the ravages of anorexia. Seaman termed the book a "magnetic memoir," while a reviewer in Publishers Weekly deemed it "competent but unexciting." A critic for Kirkus Reviews, however, offered unadulterated praise, calling it an "evocative, superbly written tale of a woman's journey to self-understanding."

In addition to her nonfiction works, Brooks has also written two novels. The first was shortlisted for the Impac Award. Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague is a work of historical fiction set in Great Britain in the 1660s. Year of Wonders is based on the true story of the English village of Eyam after the bubonic plague has arrived. The people who live in the village make a difficult decision to quarantine their community from the outside in an effort to stop the plague in its tracks. Writing in Publishers Weekly, a critic commented that "Brooks keeps readers glued through the starkly dramatic episodes and a haunting story of flawed, despairing human beings. This poignant and powerful account carries the pulsing beat of a sensitive imagination and the challenge of moral complexity."

Narrating Year of Wonders is the fictional Anna Frith, a young mother, shepherdess, and servant to the town's pastor. She outlives her immediately family and helps with the sickness in Eyam. Brooks uses her to relate the devastating effects of the disease on Anna and those around her, and also allows the character to experience personal growth from the experience. Of Brooks' characterization of Frith, Liz Doran wrote in Geelong Small Press Publishing: "The voice of Anna is a charming blend of innocence and natural intelligence with enough historical dialect to resonate the period without being tedious."

A chance discovery inspired Brooks to research Louis May Alcott and her father, A. Bronson Alcott, which led her to write March. This novel focuses on what happened to John March, the father character in Alcott's Little Women, the year he was away from his wife and four daughters. March was based on Alcott's own father, an educator, abolitionist, and progressive thinker. During the course of the novel, March serves as a chaplain for the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War, primarily away from the front lines, and encounters many challenges on and off the battlefield. Brooks depicts him as a complex character, idealistic and full of conviction yet disheartened by his experiences. Critics responded positively to her creation of March. For example, Christina Schwarz wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that "the naive earnestness and ready affection with which Brooks endows him, the high standards he sets for himself, and his remarkable willingness to admit mistakes make him wonderfully likable, even when he is egregiously in the wrong." A number of reviewers felt that March was a respectful tribute to Alcott's original novel. As an Economist contributor noted, "Ms. Brooks merely imbues her pages with the same perfume that rises from Alcott's account of the saintly Marches."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Brooks, Geraldine, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Brooks, Geraldine, Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over, Anchor Books/Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, April, 2005, Christina Schwarz, review of March, p. 115.

Booklist, September 15, 1994, Mary Ellen Sullivan, review of Nine Parts of Desire, p. 88; November 1, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of Foreign Correspondence, p. 436.

Economist March 26, 2005, review of March, p. 84.

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1997, review of Foreign Correspondence, pp. 1616-1617.

Newsweek, February 13, 1995, Laura Shapiro, review of Nine Parts of Desire, p. 81.

Publishers Weekly, November 21, 1994, review of Nine Parts of Desire, p. 64; October 27, 1997, review of Foreign Correspondence, p. 57; June 25, 2001, review of Year of Wonders, p. 43.