海角大神

We start today with a great-grandmother in Little Rock, Arkansas. When the local school district put out a plea for donations to offset debts and federal cuts for school lunches, she wrote a check for $11.89 - all she could afford - to ensure that hunger did not offset a hunger for learning. Her generosity has an echo of sorts in a distant land. In Syria, people are devouring books that were banned during decades of dictatorship, feeding and democratizing thought with fiction, non-fiction, and religious texts. One Damascus bookseller put it best: "Before we had daily interrogations by the security services. Now everything is permitted, nothing is banned. Now is a golden era for books!"