Margaret Bald
My latest book is From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937. Forbes was a renowned British explorer and intrepid traveler during the 1920s and 1930s, known as much for her glamour and charm as for her splendid adventures and the engaging and insightful books she wrote about them. I edited and wrote the introduction to this first anthology of Forbes's travel writing. It includes selections from her travels in Morocco, Ethiopia, Yemen, Arabia, Turkey, Persia, Iraq, and Afghanistan as well as Java, Sumatra, and China.
I am also the author of Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds (2011, 2006, 1998), which along with three companion volumes published by Facts On File, is the leading reference work on literary censorship. I am the co-author of 120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature (2011, 2005) and 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature (1999), two paperbacks drawn from the reference book series, which offer profiles of books in the U.S. and around the world that have been banned or targeted for censorship.
I have been a freelance journalist and foreign correspondent reporting from Latin America and North Africa, managing editor of World Press Review magazine, and an editorial consultant to the United Nations. I am currently an editor and director of publications at a nonprofit social policy research organization and live with my husband, Jonathan Calvert, and two sons in Brooklyn, New York.
“Forbes did, in fact, break new ground for women...She was an irrepressible and independent traveler who took risky and difficult trips, braved the hostility of the colonial officials and bureaucrats of the British empire, and invaded the male sphere of exploration, using charm, chutzpah--and her extensive network of establishment connections--to get where she wanted to go. (From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937)”
“Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor's grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)”
“For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, 'To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.' (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)”