Mariane Pearl speaking at the Jumer's Casino in Rock Island, Illinois, on November 10, 2011.
On November 10th, 2011, Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl spoke in the Quad Cities (IA/IL). She spoke in the grand ballroom of a casino, which was different, and I signed up too late to have dinner. Tickets were $35 if you were alone, $30 if you were with a group and $20 to just show up for the speech, which is what I did.
I went to see exactly what a speaker on the lecture circuit commanding big bucks, no doubt, would use as props…what her technique would be. I don’t know what I expected, but I know that, if I had been doing it, I’d have asked permission to use a 3-minute clip from the Angelina Jolie film based on her book. I might have considered reading a passage from the more intense parts of the book. Her topic wouldn’t scream PowerPoint, but exactly what would Mariane Pearl, noted journalist and radio hostess, do?
For openers, she’d have to exchange the original microphone, which almost deafened us all, for a different microphone. Good touch: 2 large screens to the sides of the podium, like at a rock concert. Room full. Probably 300 to 500 women there (you do the math).
Then came the speech itself. My impressions?
I have not read her book, primarily because I saw the movie. Not a good reason, I realize, but the only one I have. Mariane Pearl and Angelina Jolie would, no doubt, get along very well IRL because they each seem to have that “la la land” attitude of “Let’s all be one big happy universe.” She sketched her early meeting with “Danny,” her husband who was kidnapped and beheaded by terrorists in Karachi, Pakistan, when she was pregnant with their first child Adam. She said, “If we gave up, then something was lost that was bigger than ourselves, so we could not give up.” She talked about living your beliefs by moving from Paris to India with her husband.
The crowd at Jumer's Casino in Rock Island for Mariane Pearl's speech on November 10, 2011.
I remember that Mariane Pearl, in the film, takes over the investigation, pretty much. She admits that she had a computer that the authorities thought might yield clues to who had taken her husband, but she refused to give it up.
“Somehow, the question of life and death and survival became secondary. I knew what terrorists were trying to achieve…All of a sudden it became like two visions of the future were fighting one another.”
For five weeks Mariane and her team “survived.” “It was a fight between two very extreme visions and it’s about justice. That’s unacceptable.”
Mariane told of the instant when she learned of the murder of her husband and grabbing an AK47 machine gun, but then realizing “how easy it is to kill someone who has virtue. I was at that point. That would be defeat. Whatever is the most difficult thing, I must do it. Revenge would be easy; dialogue would be hard. I put the gun down.”
Ms. Pearl then described, somewhat disingenuously, her writing of the book “A Mighty Heart” back in New York City. A major publisher was going to publish this book. She said, “I had no idea whether anyone was going to read that book.” That was the point where I decided that Mrs. Pearl was not being totally honest with herself or us. Saying that she “didn’t know whether anyone would read that book” would be tantamount to Jaycee Duggard (who was kept prisoner in a psychotic’s backyard for 18 years) saying she didn’t know whether anyone would read her book.
The view of the world as one big happy place also didn’t wash, for me.
The impressions I came away with from the speech were that Ms. Pearl looked a bit like a younger version of Imelda Marcos, was not totally being honest with us about her expectations for her best-selling book, and that I was glad I had paid only $20 to hear her, rather than $35 to sit at a table and eat dinner beforehand. I proceeded to meet my husband in the gambling area of the casino and we went to dinner.
All-in-all, maybe I’m just spoiled by presentations like the one Raymond Benson has crafted for his novelizations of James Bond movies. Or maybe I was just tired. Or maybe Ms. Pearl was just tired that night. And there were technical issues, at first, which were quickly overcome.
Pamela
Maybe Ms Pearl does not really like doing these lectures but does them because she can make a lot of money and she can also do some good publicity for her book. I just attended a lecture myself about someone who had written a cook book. She seemed like a nice person, but I didn’t feel she knew very much about cooking. This author had spent a lot of time in France and she seemed more interested in speaking about her time as a student living in French peoples’ homes. I was a French student who spent a lot of time living in French peoples’ homes and I doubt many people would like to hear about that for an hour or so.