Nonfiction Archives - Page 5 of 56

We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura, illustrated by Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki [in Booklist]

15 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese American, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Three months after the Pearl Harbor bombings, rumors of racist mass eviction became reality when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, unlawfully condemning 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps across the western U.S. Following political leaders spouting conspiracy...

Little Victories: Autism Through a Father’s Eyes by Yvon Roy [in Shelf Awareness]

28 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Canadian, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

Yvon Roy's autobiographical Little Victories opens with what must be one of the most charming visual depictions of conception. Mark (Roy's alter-ego) and Chloe's union proves "magnificent": their relationship is joyous, their newborn son the wished-for "mini-me." But 18 months later, Oliver "still hasn't said a...

Asian American #OwnVoices: Artfully Narrated Middle Grade, YA, and Crossover Audiobooks [in School Library Journal]

17 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Chinese American, Fiction, Filipina/o American, Hapa/Mixed-race, Indian American, Iranian American, Japanese American, Korean American, Lists, Memoir, Middle Grade Readers, Nonfiction, Pakistani American, Persian American, Repost, South Asian American, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese American, Young Adult Readers

Welcome to Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month. The year remains somber, as the APA community combats dramatically increasing anti-Asian violence around the country and continues to mourn the eight people, including six women of Asian descent, killed in a Georgia mass shooting. Despite a U.S....

From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement by Paula Yoo [in Shelf Awareness]

10 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Korean American, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

On June 19, 1982, 27-year-old Chinese American Vincent Chin was bludgeoned with a baseball bat by Ronald Ebens and stepson Michael Nitz. The two white men, like too many others, were driven by anti-Asian resentment over Detroit's declining auto industry due to Japanese competition. "It's...

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965 by Jia Lynn Yang [in Booklist]

04 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Chinese American, Nonfiction, Pan-Asian Pacific American, Repost, Taiwanese American, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Pulitzer Prized NYT editor/journalist Jia Lynn Yang makes history intimately personal: “This book is an attempt to fuse my family’s history to the history of the country that found a place for us ...

Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho [in Booklist]

26 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Hapa/Mixed-race, Korean, Korean American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW “In my lifetime, I’ve had at least three mothers,” Grace M. Cho writes. After surviving the Korean War, Cho’s mother worked as a bar girl at a U.S. naval base during the U.S. occupation of South Korea. In 1971, she married Cho’s father, a...

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick [in Booklist]

15 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Tibetan

Let’s just agree that Casandra Campbell is not fluent in any Asian languages – which makes her an odd (mis)casting choice for a title set mostly in Tibet, populated by mostly Tibetan characters. That said, lauded journalist Barbara Demick’s extraordinary latest is a book to...

Speak, Okinawa: A Memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina [in Shelf Awareness]

10 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Hapa/Mixed-race, Japanese, Japanese American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Elizabeth Miki Brina claims her voice with resounding clarity in her memoir, Speak, Okinawa. As the daughter of a U.S. soldier with Jamestown ancestry and an Okinawan immigrant mother, Brina's identity was always a negotiation of race, class, privilege. By opening her stupendous book...

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way: A Memoir by Louis Chude-Sokei [in Shelf Awareness]

24 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Black/African American, Caribbean, Caribbean American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Louis Chude-Sokei's parents were known as "the JFK and Jackie O of Biafra," a former West African nation "that had disappeared or been 'killed.'" Half a century later, Chude-Sokei examines what it meant to be "the first son of the...

The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro [in Booklist]

08 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Indian, Indian American, Nonfiction, Repost, South Asian, South Asian American

International headlines about the 2012 Delhi rape victim exposed the Indian megacity as “the rape capital of the world,” spurring award-winning journalist Sonia Faleiro (Beautiful Thing, 2012) to “find out, and to gather my findings in a book-length study of rape in India.” She finds...

The Parakeet by Espé, translated by Hannah Chute [in Booklist]

28 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, European, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Penn State University Press, already a publisher of award-winning graphic titles, launches a new imprint, Graphic Mundi, showcasing comics intent on “drawing our worlds together.” Among its inaugural line-up is French comics artist Espé’s spectacular, autobiographically inspired homage to a childhood haunted by mental...

Fathoms: The World in the Whale By Rebecca Giggs [in Booklist]

27 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Australian, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

For much of the 12 hours here, prolific Shiromi Arserio’s crisp-yet-soft, melodic-but-never-sing-songy voice seems just right for narrating Australian journalist Rebecca Giggs’ stupendous cetacean debut. The London native’s aural transfer to Down Under is mostly convincing, but when she moves beyond English, her fluency stumbles...

Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller [in Shelf Awareness]

26 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Memoir, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Nonfiction, Repost

That Danielle Geller survived to write Dog Flowers seems miraculous. Her raw debut might need a content warning: abandonment, alcoholism, attempted suicide, domestic violence, parental incarcerations, family deaths – much of which is intrinsically linked to her enigmatic, missing mother. In bearing elegiac witness to...

Parenthesis by Élodie Durand, translated by Edward Gauvin [in Booklist]

22 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, European, French, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation

At 24, “in 1994, or maybe 1995 already,” French artist Élodie Durand first began experiencing symptoms – what her family would later call her “spells” – that included abrupt memory loss and erratic behavior, such as baseless rage and violent outbursts. Her diagnosis of epilepsy...

Best Audiobooks of 2020 [in Library Journal]

08 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, British, European, Fiction, Indian, Indian American, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, South Asian American, Vietnamese American

Best Audiobooks of 2020 by Stephanie Klose and Terry Hong This year’s top audiobooks, selected by LJ’s audio editor and reviewers, represent the best recorded literature published between November 2019 and December 2020. In a year that’s been like no other, these picks moved us, provided escape, and...

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami [in Booklist]

31 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Arab American, Audio, Memoir, Moroccan American, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Laila Lalami dovetails her own journey as a Morocco-born, UK-and US-educated, naturalized Muslim American, expanding into a socio-historical examination of what it means to be a “conditional citizen” in the United States. Conditional citizens, she explains, “are Americans who cannot enjoy the full rights,...

I Just Wanted to Save My Family: A Memoir by Stéphan Pélissier with Cécile-Agnès Champart, translated by Adriana Hunter [in Shelf Awareness]

23 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, European, French, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Syrian, Translation

The title alone is a universally resounding cry for help: I Just Wanted to Save My Family. It also proves to be French legal expert and first-time author Stéphan Pélissier's best defense to challenge a guilty verdict that demands seven years of imprisonment. Co-written with Cécile-Agnès Champart...

Papaya Salad by Elisa Macellari, translated by Carla Roncalli Di Montorio [in Booklist]

26 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, European, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Hapa/Mixed-race, Italian, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Southeast Asian, Thai, Translation, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Although Thai Italian artist Elisa Macellari’s Kusama (2020) hit U.S. shelves first, Papaya Salad is actually her debut title, originally published in 2018 in her native Italy. Introducing her tale as “a story the protagonist told me when I was a child and which I stumbled across...

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women by Wayétu Moore [in Booklist]

18 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Black/African American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Wayétu Moore is the first to speak, although only briefly, to share her initial excitement over the possibility of narrating her elegant memoir. That opportunity, alas, became another “casualty of COVID-19,” preventing her from safe studio time, but she adds a personal thanks to narrator...

The Magical Language of Others by E. J. Koh [in Library Journal]

16 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Korean, Korean American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

That she’s fluent in Korean, Japanese, and English ensures a smooth double debut – as memoirist and narrator – for poet E. J. Koh (A Lesser Love). Her languid delivery is a lulling invitation into emotional intimacy. From her San Jose, California, birth into early...

BookDragon Nonfiction