MARY TILLMAN'S BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN new book, "Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman," is a both a moving portrait of her son's tragically short life and an indictment of a military and government that misinformed her about the cause of the Army Ranger's death.

"Boots on the Ground" shifts between touching vignettes about Pat's youth and rise to fame as an NFL football player to sad accounts on how his family struggled with grief and with a bureaucracy seemingly determined to obscure how and why Pat Tillman died.

In the wake of September 11, Tillman signed up for the military with his brother Kevin, a minor-league baseball player. After Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, his family and the public were told that he'd been shot while heroically battling the enemy.

About a month later, the truth emerged: He was shot by another Ranger.

In his mother's account, the family is told so many different stories about how Pat died that it becomes impossible to determine what happened that day. In the end, Mary believes "Pat was killed in a senseless act by soldiers who were wildly and inexplicably out of control."

But she leaves open the possibility that he was murdered. The one thing clear to Mary Tillman is that the American army and government intentionally misled the American public.

"Pat's death was not thoroughly investigated," Tillman said. "I think it was prompted by the [Bush] Administration — they were prompted to cover it up, because the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was breaking that week. Things were falling apart in Fallujah. The most casualties of the war [occurred] in April 2004. They wanted Pat's death to deflect attention from those things and the only way they could do that was to turn it into this grandiose narrative.

"They never really found out what Pat did out there," Mary continued. "They made up a story before they found out what his actions were. His uniform was destroyed, his equipment was destroyed — it was not sent back to show to the medical examiner. All these things are acts of disrespect. I don't think any soldier believes that will happen. They know there is a possibility of death, being wounded — but they don't expect the government to disrespect their service."

Tillman will further discuss her book and her son via a live chat on WashingtonPost.com at noon on May 12 and in a reading that evening at Olsson's-Penn Quarter.

Continue Reading "Blanket Cover-Up: Mary Tillman" »

"WHY WOULD AN educated Midwestern white girl think that when she got her college degree, the best job out there was forming a band?"

Soon after Laurie Lindeen asked herself this question, she ended up with a novel.

"Petal Pushers: A Rock 'n' Roll Cinderella Story" is Lindeen's memoir of growing up in Madison, Wisc., and eventually marrying Replacements singer Paul Westerberg and starting a family. In between, Lindeen tells of moving to Minneapolis and touring the country as frontwoman for the all-female punk trio Zuzu's Petals.

But for all the fun she had with her band, "I was never a rock star."

And Lindeen cautioned, "I didn't write a tell-all — I wrote a memoir. It's not just the beginning and end of my band. ... It's a book about fronting an all-women indie rock band, but it's also about growing up Midwestern, it's about how women learn to deal with their bodies, it's about women in music and it's a lot about my relationship with my father."

Of course, her relationship with one of alt-rock's idols plays no small role in "Petal Pushers," either.

Continue Reading "Pleased to Meet Me: Laurie Lindeen" »

GILBERT KING will read from his new book, "The Execution of Willie Francis," which covers a gruesome chapter in U.S. judicial history. The book tells the story of a young black man sentenced to death in the 1940s.

» Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th St. NW; 6:30 p.m., free; 202-387-7638. (U St.-Cardozo)

HOW MANY MUSICIANS can claim to have jammed with whales, birds and Pete Seeger?

Probably only one: David Rothenberg.

Though he's fairly tight with the legendary folk singer, Rothenberg is clearly more fascinated by grooving with the natural world. A few years ago, he was making sweet sounds with creatures that fly for his book, "Why Birds Sing." Now, he's waxing poetic (and scientific) about underwater tunes in his new book, "Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound."

"Once you start hearing [whales' sounds] for the first time, you think it's kind of strange," says Rothenberg, 45, who is an accomplished jazz musician, "but after a while, you start to hear that there are these patterns with structure to them. It's very interesting."

"Thousand Mile Song," which comes with a CD of "whale music" recorded live and produced in the studio by Rothenberg, documents one man's quest to listen to and learn from the unique rhythms and noises whales produce underwater. Scientists know very little about why whales sing, and maybe even less about whether anyone can actually interact with the nautical beasts through human instruments and sounds. But that didn't stop the professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology from playing his clarinet for whales from Russia to Vancouver to Hawaii.

How, exactly, would one pull off that sort of interspecies interaction, you might ask?

Continue Reading "Ocean of Sound: David Rothenberg" »

LISTEN UP, future President of Our Great Nation. Madeleine Albright has some suggestions for you, and she has kindly organized them in her new book, "Memo to the President Elect: How We can Restore America's Reputation and Leadership."

The former secretary of state focuses on assembling a first-rate foreign policy team, anticipating the actions of other key countries and reviving our commitment to our founding ideals. Hey, even if you're not Obama, Clinton or McCain, a lunch break with Madam Secretary might do you some good.

» The Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE; 12 p.m., free; 202-707-5000. (Capitol South)

ERIC NAVARRO'S MEMOIR of his time in Iraq, "God Willing: My Wild Ride With the New Iraqi Army," is extremely crude.

But that's not the only reason it's an eye-opening, disturbing and disheartening look at Iraq.

Navarro, a Marine sent to train the new Iraqi army, encountered countless barriers during his '04-'05 tour, and the resulting book is a tragic comedy in which the protagonist is constantly getting shelled and shot at and is obsessed with Iraqi bowel movements.

The combat vet sees the vast differences between Iraqi and American approaches to restroom etiquette as emblematic of the cultural chasm between the occupiers and the occupied, and his book reads like a list of reasons why the U.S. should not be in Iraq.

Navarro writes that he went to Fallujah in December 2004, had little access to a translator and was shelled almost immediately after arriving. Months of chaos ensued, and Navarro writes that his mission was severely undermanned and that the behavior of the Iraqi army was almost entirely disappointing.

"God Willing" is full of familiar military catch-22s, bitterness, confusion and fear of going native.

So it's amazing to hear Navarro on the phone now, saying that we should leave our troops in Iraq — and that it will likely take the U.S. 20 years to finish the job.

What changed his perception so radically?

A second tour.

"Vast improvement. Vast," Navarro reported recently. "I did not personally get shot at once, which was unreal. Progress all across the board. I was able to see that Americans learn from their mistakes. Part of my book points out that during my first tour, the American effort behind the advisers was not there. Well, now it is. We've learned that it is truly the main effort [and] we're putting a lot more resources into those adviser teams. However, the Iraqis still have a ways to go. There is progress. They're setting up municipal governments, they're taking control of their own lives.

"It looks like a lot of the Iraqis that we talked to have hope for the future," he continued. "That was completely nonexistent in 2005."

"There are signs of progress, and it shows that if we put our mind to it, with the right strategy and the right leaders, we can actually accomplish this, but it'll take a long time. Anyone that thinks we are going to withdraw anytime soon — or that we should — is not being very realistic. We can leave. And then it will just completely implode. ... I was in Haditha, which is northwest of where I was last time. Haditha, interestingly enough, is the site of the widely reported incident where civilians were killed. I mean, I drove by the site and, again, now that town is flourishing, [it's] pro-American and working with us. I mean, it's an amazing turnaround considering that was one of the epicenters of anti-coalition sentiment. It's pretty interesting to see the turnaround."

Express spoke with Navarro about staying the course, homosexuality in Iraq and the new Iraqi Army. He'll further discuss his new book on May 6 at noon at the Library of Congress.

Continue Reading "Damage Report: Marine Eric Navarro" »

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON THRIVES at an intersection of punditry and celebrity, but her new book will not endear her to other members of the media elite.

In addition to the Bush administration and its standard-bearers, "Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution and Made Us All Less Safe" skewers folks like Tim Russert and Judith Miller and blasts away at fat targets such as the news media's obsession with Anna Nicole et al.

Huffington also takes on the media's practice of showing two sides of every issue. For instance, on an issue such as global warming, Huffington believes that the public's interest is not served by the addition of a quack skeptic to a panel discussion.

"There are such things as facts," the author writes. "There is such a thing as reality. And refusing to see those facts and report that reality — undiluted by an 'on the other hand' mixer — isn't a sign of objectivity, it's a sign of intellectual laziness and journalistic muddled thinking."

Huffington says the media has attention-deficit disorder and that one mission of her very popular Web site, HuffingtonPost.com, is to maintain a focus on important issues that the mainstream media has a tendency to flit away from.

"We have made sure that we cover stories in a very different way," Huffington said recently about her Web site. "The mainstream media breaks stories and then abandons them, like the big story The New York Times broke on the Pentagon delivering propaganda points to basically mislead the American people. That story has been abandoned by the mainstream media. The Huffington Post has been covering it on a daily basis, both in the news and in the blogs."

But much of the "Right Is Wrong" consists of the author damning "the lunatic fringe," with its own chronically inaccurate statements of the past seven years. One can see the influence of The Huffington Post on the author's writing: The book aggregates a torrent of facts, opinions and large blocks of text from other sources.

"Right Is Wrong," doesn't break much new ground, but it is a solid serving of red meat for Huffington's base.

Express spoke to Huffington, who reads at Politics & Prose on May 5.

Continue Reading "Left Is Right: Arianna Huffington" »

THE OTHER BUSBOYS & POETS (that's the one in Shirlington, Virginians) is hosting Jo-Marie Burt, a George Mason scholar who will sign and discuss her book, "Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society."

In her impressive work, Burt offers one-of-a-kind analysis of Peru's Shining Path insurgency and the Alberto Fujimori government.

»> Busboys & Poets, 4251 S. Campbell Ave., Arlington; Wed., 7 p.m., free; 703-379-9756.