Foot and Fire

We, as women lawyers, condemn the blatant and gruesome killing of Atty. Mia Manuelita Mascariñas-Green whose assailants are still on the run. Hence, we feel that as practicing women lawyers who are also nurturing mothers and sisters just like Atty. Green, we need to openly renew our commitment to our profession, to uphold lawfulness and Justice, and to speak to the Green children on the danger of hatred and the importance of forgiveness.    TO THE LEGAL COMMUNITY. During her lifetime, Atty. Green is not known to us personally or professionally but as her fellow lawyers who have been unconditionally defending every man's Constitutional right to due process, we cannot help but express our protestation to this inhuman, uncivilized and unjustified killing by the assailants (and their mastermind), which only perpetuate the culture of impunity. However, despite this personal protestations and constantly living with this kind of professional hazard, we want to assure the legal commu

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers Michael Holroyd Nonfiction, Picador, 2012 (First Publication 2010) Paperback, 264 pages This one is out of my usual book menu. But I always welcome a little change. With this one, I thought I will be reading more of Rodin but I ended up reading about “scandals” of the royalties like reading an intriguing novel. Holroyd has the lyrical rhythm as well as sincere and inquiring tone that made me proceed. I was about to ditch this one early on because the print is so small (But there were two prior publications in Great Britain and US which you can pick up instead of this one). But since I am into Italy right now, I got hold of this book because the book is also inspired by Villa Cimbrone which is located in Ravello, an Italian village. Holroyd's interest started from the time he saw an Eve Fairfax bust scupture by Rodin, but it turned out that the Eve Fairfax-Rodin link became a mere jump off of his research on

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana Gayle Tzemach Lemmon Nonfiction, Harper, 2011 Paperback, 243 pages Khair Khana is in Afghanistan, a country known to me as war-torn and the place where Osama Bin Laden was killed. That is the macro picture. But this book gave me a micro shot of Afghanistan through the story of Kamil and her sisters. Fresh from reading a memoir called Reading Lolita in Tehran, I still have the full grasp on how women were treated when the Mujahideen (holy warriors) are running the Muslim country. Both events narrated in Reading Lolita and the times when the Dressmaker of Khair Khana was established happened in the 1990s and both stories were born out of the fact that women in these two Muslim country were suddenly limited in their clothing and space. This book chronicles the triumph of the human spirit in times of adversity, specifically that of a woman during the precarious times. When suddenly the times changed in Afhganistan, Kamila saw herself alone to