“Srey Rath was a 15-year-old self-confident Cambodian girl when she was trafficked to a brothel, drugged and beaten, and forced to work 7 days a week, 15 hours a day sleeping with male customers…”
Award-winning author Nicholas Kristof has spent his career telling the stories of young girls like Srey and speaking out against human trafficking. The seventh annual MacReads program, a community-wide book reading and discussion that culminates in a presentation by the author, featured Kristof with this year’s selection, Half the Sky.
In the book, Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, use personal accounts from women around the world to focus on the three main abuses that women face: gender-based violence, maternal mortality, and sex trafficking and forced prostitution. The book will be the focus of an upcoming documentary.
“I am fortunate to have a voice,” said Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist for the New York Times. “I can shine a spotlight on issues that are ignored and get them on the public stage.”
Speaking to a packed auditorium in May, Kristof suggested that education is one means to combat gender discrimination and the oppression of women.
“If you educate a girl, it has a very profound impact,” he said. “If we get more girls in school to play a role in society, over time it makes a difference.”
Raised on a farm outside Yamhill, Kristof edited a Yamhill-Carlton High School newspaper while also reporting for the News-Register, then enrolled at Harvard University. While earning his degree, he held a leadership post on the Harvard Crimson, completed a series of newspaper internships culminating at the Washington Post, and won a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue graduate studies at Oxford University. He began his career at Newsweek, but soon landed at the New York Times.
Kristof and WuDunn are also the authors of Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia and China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. Together, they won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square Democracy Movement. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006 for his commentary in the New York Times.
Read more about Kristof in the News-Register or learn more at www.halftheskymovement.org.
