A strike pattern is a signature of violence carved into the land-bomb craters or fragments of explosives left behind, forgotten. In Strike Patterns, poet and anthropologist Leah Zani journeys to a Lao river community where people live alongside such relics of a secret war. With sensitive and arresting prose, Zani reveals the layered realities that settle atop one another in Laos-from its French colonial history to today's authoritarian state-all blown open by the war. This excavation of postwar...
As children, Shirley Ann Higuchi and her brothers knew Heart Mountain only as the place their parents met, imagining it as a great Stardust Ballroom in rural Wyoming. As they grew older, they would come to recognize the name as a source of great sadness and shame for their older family members, part of the generation of Japanese Americans forced into the hastily built concentration camp in the aftermath of Executive Order 9066. Only after a serious cancer diagnosis did Shirley's mother, Setsuko...
A mold-breaking memoir of Asian American identity, political activism, community, and purpose. Not Yo’ Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto—artist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who...
Widowed mom shatters notions of how trailblazing CEOs look and act If Crazy Rich Asians and a Greek tragedy had a literary offspring, it would be the spitting image of Why Should Guys Have All the Fun? The true story of resolute immigration lawyer and activist Loida Lewis, Why Should Guys Have All the Fun? begins with Loida’s adventure-packed Philippine upbringing. A torrid love affair with brilliant, irascible financier Reginald Lewis follows, as does regal living in Manhattan and Paris, and gu...
Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other’s best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated by chance at the end of the Chinese Civil War. For the next thirty years, while one became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist, they could not even communicate. On Taiwan, Jun married a Nationalist general, established an important trading company, and ultimately emigrated to the United States. On the Com...
In 1964 V.S. Naipaul published An Area of Darkness, his semi-autobiographical account of a year in India. Two visits later, prompted by the Emergency of 1975, he came to write India: A Wounded Civilization, in which he casts a more analytical eye over Indian attitudes. In this work, he recapitulates and further investigates the feelings that the vast, mysterious and agonised continent has previously aroused in him. What he sees and what he hears - evoked so superbly and vividly in this book - on...
Daughter of the Samurai (Modern Library Torchbearers)
by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto
