Stephen G. Bloom

In 1987, a group of Lubavitchers, one of the most orthodox and zealous of the Jewish sects, opened a kosher slaughterhouse just outside tiny Postville, Iowa (pop. 1,465). When the business became a worldwide success, Postville found itself both revived and divided. The town's initial welcome of the Jews turned into confusion, dismay, and even disgust. By 1997, the town had engineered a vote on what everyone agreed was actually a referendum: whether or not these Jews should stay. The quiet, restrained Iowans were astonished at these brash, assertive Hasidic Jews, who ignored the unwritten laws of Iowa behavior in almost every respect. The Lubavitchers, on the other hand, could not compromise with the world of Postville; their religion and their tradition quite literally forbade it. Were the Iowans prejudiced, or were the Lubavitchers simply unbearable? Award-winning journalist Stephen G. Bloom found himself with a bird's-eye view of this battle and gained a new perspective on questions that haunt America nationwide. What makes a community? How does one accept new and powerfully different traditions? Is money more important than history? In the dramatic and often poignant stories of the people of Postville - Jew and gentile, puzzled and puzzling, unyielding and unstoppable - lies a great swath of America today.

As a young journalist at the Brazil Herald from 1979-81, Stephen G. Bloom spent his formative years working in Rio’s seedy Lapa district, surrounded by expatriates, drug runners, and pornographers. Bloom shares the wild, untamed history of this Brazil-based English-language newspaper in The Brazil Chronicles. The newspaper was a breeding ground for a different kind of storyteller — audacious risk-takers who told madcap tales of Amazon plantations, Confederate emigres, and lost Indian tribes. Several major journalistic talents cut their teeth at the Brazil Herald, including acclaimed New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc, Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, and the notorious Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Drawing from extensive research and over 150 interviews with his former colleagues, Bloom’s exploration of the Brazil Herald is both entertaining and academically rigorous. The book also doubles as a coming-of-age memoir, following the young Bloom as he embarks on his quest to be a reporter, relocating to an entirely new country where he did not speak the local language, to pursue under-the-radar stories. His firsthand experience with the Brazil Herald allows him to provide an insider, eye-witness account of the paper’s colorful history, transporting the reader to its sweltering newsroom and delving into the lives of its staff members. Even as he weaves between personal narrative, history, and accounts from other reporters, it remains clear who the book’s main character is: the trailblazing newspaper itself.

The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the “Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment” she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate the scorching impact of racism. Elliott separated students into two groups. She instructed the brown-eyed children to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. Without telling the children the experiment’s purpose, Elliott demonstrated how easy it was to create abhorrent racist behavior based on students’ eye color, not skin color. As a result, Elliott would go on to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, followed by a stormy White House conference, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and thousands of media events and diversity-training sessions worldwide, during which she employed the provocative experiment to induce racism. Was the experiment benign? Or was it a cruel, self-serving exercise in sadism? Did it work? Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a meticulously researched book that details for the first time Jane Elliott’s jagged rise to stardom. It is an unflinching assessment of the incendiary experiment forever associated with Elliott, even though she was not the first to try it out. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town’s children for more than a decade. The searing story is a cautionary tale that examines power and privilege in and out of the classroom. It also documents small-town White America’s reflex reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent meteoric rise of diversity training that flourishes today. All the while, Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes reveals the struggles that tormented a determined and righteous woman, today referred to as the “Mother of Diversity Training,” who was driven against all odds to succeed.

Inside the Writer's Mind propels readers into 30 very different stories, written for magazines, newspapers and the Internet. Among the stories Stephen G. Bloom dissects are profiles of accused murderers, a Little League umpire, a husband and wife who sign a suicide pact, a world-famous Brazilian plastic surgeon, and a notorious abortionist. Bloom writes about his job canning fruit cocktail, a disaster of a Caribbean cruise vacation, a lethal family of professional wrestlers, and an afternoon spent with Dr. Ruth.