Grass for My Pillow by Saiichi Maruya, translated by Dennis Keene [in AsianWeek]
First published more than 35 years ago, Pillow follows the story of Shokichi Hamada, who escapes military service during World War II by fleeing to the countryside – and by...
Collateral Damage
The Aug.13 issue of USA Today reports that more than 150 books that deal with Sept. 11 have already been or are about to be...
Fox Girl takes readers back to post-Korean War “America Town,” where the abandoned, racially mixed children of U.S. soldiers fought for bare survival and Korean women continued to service occupying GIs in order to put food...
Over 60 years ago, the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 – “a day that will live in infamy” as then-President Roosevelt named it – eventually led to the signing of Executive Order 9066...
Fascinating look at Japanese American junior high school students writing letters of patriotic loyalty to their homeroom teacher, in the face of impending, unjust internment.
Review:
A history of two revolutionary women in Nepal who challenged corruption and dictatorship, whose stories were deliberately lost and then nearly forgotten, and the author’s own search for truth.
Review: <a...
A sweeping saga of Tibet before the Chinese occupation, told through the privileged view of the self-proclaimed “renowned idiot son” of a Tibetan chieftain.
Review:
Linda Sue Park's Post-Newbery Award Life
Although Linda Sue Park was just 9 when her work was first published – a haiku for a children’s magazine – it would be almost three decades before she attempted her...
The Making of a Hero
Helie Lee's Rescue Mission
When Helie Lee wrote her first book, the bestselling Still Life With Rice: A Young American Woman Discovers the Life and...
Powerful, timely collection of testimonies from the survivors of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's infamous Executive Order 9066, and reactions from their children.
Review:
A Filipino family and friends struggle to survive the brutal Japanese occupation during World War II.
Review:
First-ever memoir available in English about the horrors of surviving and escaping the brutal Communist labor camps of closed, barren North Korea.
Review:
Letters from Ogura to his young wife, who survived the actual bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, only to die of radiation sickness...
One of the latest in the Pocketessentials series. And the perfect last title – a book devoted to how the enemy Asian alien is portrayed in the white man’s film world. Caught...
A writer tries to reconstruct the life of a childhood acquaintance – an ex-combat nurse during Vietnam – after her sudden suicide.
Review:
From one of Vietnam’s most prolific writers, The Women on the Island offers a rare glimpse into post-war Vietnam, surely an unfamiliar scenario to most English-readers, about the lonely, isolated...
One Man's Justice, the third book by bestselling Japanese author Akira Yoshimura to be translated into English, is all about perspective: One man's justice proves to be his condemnation. Takuya, an officer in the Japanese Imperial...
A startlingly complex novel, The Glass Palace opens with a literal bang, as British cannons thunder over the noise of a busy Burmese marketplace in 1885. A historical work that sweeps over a century...
Never mind its faults. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail, by Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi is going to sell well. It's already a runaway bestseller in France, where it debuted in 1999 as...
The Girl in the Picture
It is undoubtedly the most famous image of the tragedy of War: in its center, a young, naked girl screams in agony and terror, her thin...