A match made in heaven! If ever two women were meant to collaborate on a high-stakes political thriller, it is Hillary Rodham Clinton, former U.S. Secretary of State, and Louise Penny, best-selling Canadian author of crime fiction. Drawing on their areas of expertise, the dynamic duo created State of Terror, a smart and often humorous novel that is both entertaining and dead serious in its warning on the threat of terrorism, whether homegrown or globally cultivated.

The novel’s protagonist is Ellen Adams, U.S. Secretary of State for a newly elected president whose candidacy she had opposed. In her late 50s, with no previous diplomatic experience, Ellen Adams immediately faces an international crisis. Bombs have exploded on buses in London and Paris. No individual or organization claims responsibility. Plus, there’s the imminent danger that nuclear devices hidden in three American cities will detonate at a specified time. The State Department lacks information on where. In a race against the clock, Ellen Adams flies from nation to nation, meeting with world leaders in order to save lives and quell the terror unleashed by these threats.

State of Terror succeeds as a carefully plotted narrative, twisting and turning with suspense. But the novel shines most brightly in its portrayal of an accomplished woman in a universe of condescending men. Clinton and Penny show the way women are undervalued in the upper echelons of politics, including in the Oval Office and the Kremlin. As the authors write: “Maxim Ivanov stood in the middle of the room, not moving. Forcing Ellen to go to him, which she did. These petty gestures, meant to insult, had no effect on her.” Ellen knows that men like Ivanov, the Russian president, “would always undervalue and underestimate women.”

For Clinton and Penny, it was “a kind of mini mission” to reverse that diminished view of women in politics. They wanted to write female characters who did not often appear in geopolitical thrillers. “It was really important for us to put them at the centre of the action,” Clinton has said.

The warmest spot in State of Terror is reserved for the relationship between Ellen Adams and Betsy Jameson, her oldest friend and a State Department counselor, who serves as Ellen’s most trusted confidante, always by the Secretary’s side. The character of Betsy Jameson is modeled on Clinton’s best friend, Betsy Ebeling who Penny had also come to know and admire. Betsy Ebeling died in 2019. In the acknowledgements, Penny explains: “Hillary and I wanted to reflect the profound female relationships we both have…and we wanted Betsy to figure large. State of Terror is about terror, but at its core, its heart, it’s about courage and love.” Theirs. The courage and love required of Clinton and Penny to co-author this intriguing book.

In 2017, the Korean-American author Min Jin Lee published her novel, Pachinko. Now, five years later, the book is widely read in high schools, colleges and universities. At the same time, Min Jin Lee—born in Seoul, Korea and raised in a blue-collar neighborhood of Queens, New York—has achieved international acclaim. 

Yet, the success of Pachinko and the author’s rise to literary fame are not entirely accidental. In literature as in life, timing is everything. Lee’s novel Pachinko arrived at a pivotal moment for Korean culture globally. The Netflix blockbuster Squid Game, made in South Korea, is one of the most watched series in Netflix history. The popularity of Squid Game reflects the growing international prominence of South Korean culture in the past decade. This trend is evident in the growing audiences for Korean soap operas (K-dramas), K-Pop music, and Korean cinema. When the subtitled South Korean movie, Parasite, won the Oscar for best film in 2020, one observer noted that “Korean films, dramas, and music have taken over the globe.” 

Pachinko also succeeds because it opens a window on little known historical events, time periods that have slipped past us, and places that we’ve always wanted to visit, but will likely never reach. And even if we do travel in Japan, the inner workings of Japanese society described by Min Jin Lee may very well escape our scrutiny.   

In Pachinko, Lee chronicles the lives of four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese occupied Korea in the early twentieth century, then in Japan from the years before World War II to the late 1980s. Drawing on newspaper accounts and interviews she conducted while living in Japan as an adult for four years, Lee depicts the harsh treatment of Koreans in Japan and the discrimination that Koreans in Japan face in employment, housing, and education. The first line of Pachinko sets the stage for this sweeping tale of family struggle and resilience: “History has failed us. But no matter.”

Emotional authenticity is at the core of Pachinko. Lee abandoned the first draft of the novel, afraid that her characters sounded stale. They were chiefly defined by their suffering. However, “the Koreans in Japan didn’t see themselves as victims,” Lee explains in an interview. “They were so tough that I felt foolish for having pitied them. The things that happened in history were horrid, but the Korean-Japanese I talked to weren’t waiting for an apology…They’ve moved on and adapted.”

Lee titles her novel Pachinko to underscore the adaptability of Koreans in Japan. Pachinko, a cross between pinball and a slot machine, is not only an extraordinarily popular game in Japan, generating billions of dollars in business. Pachinko parlors also provide one of the few ways for Koreans to climb the social ladder and gain financial security. As in the novel, Koreans in Japan often begin working in pachinko parlors and later become managers or owners of these parlors.  The characters in Pachinko know that the game is rigged, but they believe that there is always room for randomness and hope. 

So, too, Min Jin Lee’s success as a novelist demonstrates that it’s worthwhile to take the gamble and play the game. Readers will be glad she did.

The election of Annamie Paul as leader of the Green Party of Canada comes as no surprise. She is the third woman to lead the Greens since the party was founded in 1983. It is worth remembering that the new Green leader stands on the shoulders of countless women who have been at the forefront of the environmental movement dating as far back as the early twentieth century. Nor can we forget the debt of gratitude we owe to the trailblazing work of Rachel Carson whose book, Silent Spring, prompted a revolution in environmental consciousness and did more than any other single publication to alert the world to the hazards of environmental poisoning. Never underestimate the power of a book!

But the success of Silent Spring was not a foregone conclusion. Carson herself was somewhat reluctant to take on the topic of pesticide use and its deadly consequences. She was a marine biologist and best-selling author in 1962 when Silent Spring was published. Her “poison book,” as she called Silent Spring, would undoubtedly face harsh attacks from the chemical industry, its paid scientific hacks and political allies. In fact, the chemical industry threatened to sue Carson’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, if the publication of the book went ahead. On a CBS television program in 1963, a spokesman for chemical manufacturers said: “The major claims of Miss Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, are gross distortions of the actual facts, completely unsupported by scientific, experimental evidence, and general practical experience in the field… If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Ms. Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages and the insects, and the diseases, and the vermin would once again inherit the Earth.”

The media tried to undermine Carson’s scientific credibility by accusing her of being radical, disloyal, and hysterical. Because she had no institutional affiliation, she was dismissed as an amateur who did not understand the subject of ecology like a professional scientist would. Carson was linked to faddists and pseudo-scientists, the kind of crackpots who worshiped organic gardening and natural food. Only decades later did Carson’s warning about dangerous substances in food take hold with a vengeance and help to fuel the exponential growth in the global organic food market.

Despite the criticism leveled against Rachel Carson, Silent Spring also had an enormous political impact, eventually leading to the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the banning of DDT in the United States for agricultural purposes. Yet, these achievements cannot be attributed to Carson alone. She was surrounded by a network of women environmental warriors, described compellingly in R. Musil’s book, Rachel Carson and Her Sisters (2014). Carson leaned on a coterie of female conservationists and environmental health writers for research material, mentorship and political connections.

Today, the leadership of women, regardless of age or nationality, remains central to the growth and achievements of the environmental movement. The investment of women in saving the planet from global warming is as unwavering now as Carson’s critique of pesticide use was in the thorny past.