Not much today, but I did want to share one little passage from this book. Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres wrote an important book. The blurb on the cover, “We’ve needed this book for a long time.” from the journalist and LBJ press secretary and journalist Bill Moyers seems apt. And if we needed the book when it was published in 2011 there’s no less of a need for it today.

The text has a few small problems — every book does if you pick at it long enough, and this is late night, few-pages-at-a-time reading for me — but there are so many lessons to learn.

So I was reading a bit about Jose Martí, a pioneer of social justice journalism — think Ida B. Wells. You have to agree with Gonzalez and Torres, his “dispatches should long ago have accorded him a special place among America’s nineteenth-century newsmen.”

The problem, as Gonzalez and Torres see it, is that Martí’s work was in Spanish so he often gets overlooked by English readers and historians. But, almost everything he wrote seems evocative. He was also a revolutionary in his native Cuba, but I think of him as a writer. And, based on a conversation with a colleague, I learned there are at least six books of his works that are translated into English.

So I guess I’ll have to buy some of those.

Why not? Nine other books I purchased just arrived this weekend — free shipping! — after all.

It might be a problem.

(But it isn’t a problem. I can not read whenever I want.)

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