**Please note, some of these titles are not written by persons of the specific culture, but represent histories of the culture as well as biographies about people of the culture.**
Encyclopedia of Modern Asia
By Christensen, Karen
The Encyclopedia of Modern Asia is a monumental new scholarly work, as expansive in scope as the continent of Asia itself. Under the direction of cultural anthropologist David Levinson, 800 contributors from around the world -- including 25 Asian countries -- provide 6, 000 articles on Modern Asia from a global perspective. The Encyclopedias comparative, cross-cultural approach allows students and researchers to identify the similarities and differences among Asian nations and religions. The work focuses on Asia in the modern world -- including Central Asia, the Middle East and the Far East -- and contemporary issues are given full and authoritative treatment. Historical articles emphasize people, places, events and developments that have had a lasting influence on Asia. Articles also cover Asian relations with Western nations, the relations between nations within Asia and also the flow of people, goods and ideas within Asia and globally. Also includes approximately 1, 000 black-and-white photographs, maps, sidebars and a comprehensive index.
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9780684806174
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Hardcover
Japanese Voices
They Called Us Enemy
By Takei, George
New York Times Bestseller!A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
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9781603094504
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Paperback
Colors of Confinement
By Muller, Eric L.
In 1942, Bill Manbo (1908-1992) and his family were forced from their Hollywood home into the Japanese American internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, a technology then just seven years old, to capture community celebrations and to record his family's struggle to maintain a normal life under the harsh conditions of racial imprisonment. Colors of Confinement showcases sixty-five stunning images from this extremely rare collection of color photographs, presented along with three interpretive essays by leading scholars and a reflective, personal essay by a former Heart Mountain internee.The subjects of these haunting photos are the routine fare of an amateur photographer: parades, cultural events, people at play, Manbo's son. But the images are set against the backdrop of the barbed-wire enclosure surrounding the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and the dramatic expanse of Wyoming sky and landscape. The accompanying essays illuminate these scenes as they trace a tumultuous history unfolding just beyond the camera's lens, giving readers insight into Japanese American cultural life and the stark realities of life in the camps.Also contributing to the book are:Jasmine Alinder is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she coordinates the program in public history. In 2009 she published Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press) . She has also published articles and essays on photography and incarceration, including one on the work of contemporary photographer Patrick Nagatani in the newly released catalog Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani--Works, 1976-2006 (University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2009) . She is currently working on a book on photography and the law.Lon Kurashige is associate professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His scholarship focuses on racial ideologies, politics of identity, emigration and immigration, historiography, cultural enactments, and social reproduction, particularly as they pertain to Asians in the United States. His exploration of Japanese American assimilation and cultural retention, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990 (University of California Press, 2002) , won the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2004. He has published essays and reviews on the incarceration of Japanese Americans and has coedited with Alice Yang Murray an anthology of documents and essays, Major Problems in Asian American History (Cengage, 2003) .Bacon Sakatani was born to immigrant Japanese parents in El Monte, California, twenty miles east of Los Angeles, in 1929. From the first through the fifth grade, he attended a segregated school for Hispanics and Japanese. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, his family was confined at Pomona Assembly Center and then later transferred to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. When the war ended in 1945, his family relocated to Idaho and then returned to California. He graduated from Mount San Antonio Community College. Soon after the Korean War began, he served with the U.S. Army Engineers in Korea. He held a variety of jobs but learned computer programming and retired from that career in 1992. He has been active in Heart Mountain camp activities and with the Japanese American Korean War Veterans.
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9780807835739
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Hardcover
Farewell to Manzanar
By Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki
During World War II a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew. For her father it was essentially the end of his life. At age thirty-seven, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalls life at Manzanar through the eyes of the child she was. She tells of her fear, confusion, and bewilderment as well as the dignity and great resourcefulness of people in oppressive and demeaning circumstances.
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9780618216208
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Print book
Chinese Voices
Where the Past Begins
By Tan, Amy
FROM NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR AMY TAN, A MEMOIR ON HER LIFE AS A WRITER, HER CHILDHOOD, AND THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FICTION AND EMOTIONAL MEMORYIn Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels. Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia - the real reason behind an IQ test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother - and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Supplied with candor and characteristic humor, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer's mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning.
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9780062319296
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Hardcover
My Chinese-America
By Gee, Allen
Eloquently written essays about aspects of Asian American life comprise this collection that looks at how Asian-Americans view themselves in light of Americas insensitivities, stereotypes, and expectations. My Chinese-America speaks on masculinity, identity, and topics ranging from Jeremy Lin and immigration to profiling and Asian silences. This essays have an intimacy that transcends cultural boundaries, and casts light on a vital part of American culture that surrounds and influences all of us.,
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9781939650306
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Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
By Chua, Amy
An awe-inspiring often hilarious and unerringly honest story of one mothers exercise in extreme parenting revealing the rewards-and the costs-of raising her children the Chinese way All decent parents want to do whats best for their children What Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reveals is that the Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that Western parents try to respect their childrens individuality encouraging them to pursue their true passions and providing a nurturing environment The Chinese believe that the best way to protect your children is by preparing them for the future and arming them with skills strong work habits and inner confidence Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother chronicles Chuas iron-willed decision to raise her daughters Sophia and Lulu her way-the Chinese way-and the remarkable results her choice inspires Here are some things Amy Chua would never allow her daughters to do bull have a playdate bull be in a school play bull complain about not being in a school play bull not be the student in every subject except gym and drama bull play any instrument other than the piano or violin bull not play the piano or violin The truth is Lulu and Sophia would never have had time for a playdate They were too busy practicing their instruments two to three hours a day and double sessions on the weekend and perfecting their Mandarin Of course no one is perfect including Chua herself Witness this scene According to Sophia here are three things I actually said to her at the piano as I supervised her practicing Oh my God youre just getting worse and worse Im going to count to three then I want musicality If the next times not PERFECT Im going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them But Chua demands as much of herself as she does of her daughters And in her sacrifices-the exacting attention spent studying her daughters performances the office hours lost shuttling the girls to lessons-the depth of her love for her children becomes clear Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an eye-opening exploration of the differences in Eastern and Western parenting--and the lessons parents and children everywhere teach one another.
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9781594202841
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Hardcover
365 Days For Travelers - Wisdom from Chinese Literary and Buddhist Classics
By Various,
A daybook of readings from the Chinese and Buddhist tradition in English and Chinese side-by-side
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9789865777784
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Vietnamese Voices
The Unwinding of the Miracle
By Yip-williams, Julie
As a young mother facing a terminal diagnosis, Julie Yip-Williams began to write her story, a story like no other. What began as the chronicle of an imminent and early death became something much more - a powerful exhortation to the living. That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Born blind in Vietnam, she narrowly escaped euthanasia at the hands of her grandmother, only to flee with her family the political upheaval of her country in the late 1970s. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. She would go on to become a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, and a life she had once assumed would be impossible. Then, at age thirty-seven, with two little girls at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it - a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining. Motherhood, marriage, the immigrant experience, ambition, love, wanderlust, tennis, fortune-tellers, grief, reincarnation, jealousy, comfort, pain, the marvel of the body in full rebellion - this book is as sprawling and majestic as the life it records. It is inspiring and instructive, delightful and shattering. It is a book of indelible moments, seared deep - an incomparable guide to living vividly by facing hard truths consciously. With humor, bracing honesty, and the cleansing power of well-deployed anger, Julie Yip-Williams set the stage for her lasting legacy and one final miracle: the story of her life.
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9780525511359
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Hardcover
Fire Road
By Thi, Kim Phuc Phan
Get out! Run! We must leave this place! They are going to destroy this whole place! Go, children, run first! Go now!These were the final shouts nine year-old Kim Phuc heard before her world dissolved into flames -- before napalm bombs fell from the sky, burning away her clothing and searing deep into her skin. It's a moment forever captured, an iconic image that has come to define the horror and violence of the Vietnam War. Kim was left for dead in a morgue; no one expected her to survive the attack. Napalm meant fire, and fire meant death.Against all odds, Kim lived -- but her journey toward healing was only beginning. When the napalm bombs dropped, everything Kim knew and relied on exploded along with them: her home, her country's freedom, her childhood innocence and happiness.
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9781496424303
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Paperback
Korean Voices
A Thousand Miles to Freedom
By Kim, Eunsun
Eunsun Kim was born in North Korea, one of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. As a child Eunsun loved her country...despite her school field trips to public executions, daily self-criticism sessions, and the increasing gnaw of hunger as the country-wide famine escalated.By the time she was eleven years old, Eunsun's father and grandparents had died of starvation, and Eunsun was in danger of the same. Finally, her mother decided to escape North Korea with Eunsun and her sister, not knowing that they were embarking on a journey that would take them nine long years to complete. Before finally reaching South Korea and freedom, Eunsun and her family would live homeless, fall into the hands of Chinese human traffickers, survive a North Korean labor camp, and cross the deserts of Mongolia on foot.Now, Eunsun is sharing her remarkable story to give voice to the tens of millions of North Koreans still suffering in silence. Told with grace and courage, her memoir is a riveting expos of North Korea's totalitarian regime and, ultimately, a testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit.
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9781250064646
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Hardcover
North Korea Undercover
By Sweeney, John
An authoritative and, at times, frightening investigation into the dark side of North Korean society. North Korea is like no other tyranny on earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation on earth. Big Brother is always watching: It is Orwell's 1984 made reality. Award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney is one of the few foreign journalists to have witnessed the devastating reality of life in the controversial and isolated nation of North Korea, having entered the country undercover, posing as a university professor with a group of students from the London School of Economics. Huge factories with no staff or electricity; hospitals with no patients; uniformed child soldiers; and the world-famous and eerily empty DMZ -- the DeMilitarized Zone, where North Korea ends and South Korea begins -- all framed by the relentless flow of regime propaganda from omnipresent loudspeakers.
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9781605988023
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Hardcover
All You Can Ever Know
By Chung, Nicole
A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection An Official Junior Library Guild Selection An ABA Indies Introduce Selection "This book moved me to my very core. As in all her writing, Nicole Chung speaks eloquently and honestly about her own personal story, then widens her aperture to illuminate all of us. All You Can Ever Know is full of insights on race, motherhood, and family of all kinds, but what sets it apart is the compassion Chung brings to every facet of her search for identity and every person portrayed in these pages. This book should be required reading for anyone who has ever had, wanted, or found a family -- which is to say, everyone." -- Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere "An urgent, incandescent exploration of what it can mean to love, and of who gets to belong, in an increasingly divided country. Nicole Chung's powerful All You Can Ever Know is necessary reading, a dazzling light to help lead the way during these times." -- R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries What does it mean to lose your roots -- within your culture, within your family -- and what happens when you find them? Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up -- facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn't see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from -- she wondered if the story she'd been told was the whole truth. With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets -- vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
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9781936787975
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Hardcover
Love for Imperfect Things
By Hyemin,
A #1 internationally bestselling book of spiritual wisdom about learning to love ourselves, with all our imperfections, by the Buddhist author of The Things You Can See Only When You Slow DownWhen you care for yourself first, the world begins to find you worthy of care.No one is perfect, but that shouldn't hold us back from love--for the world, for one another, or even for ourselves. In this beautifully illustrated guide, Buddhist teacher Haemin Sunim (whose name means "spontaneous wisdom") draws on examples from his own life and on his years of helping others to introduce us to the art of self-care. When we treat ourselves with compassion, empathy, and forgiveness, we learn to treat others the same way, allowing us to connect with people on a deeper level, bounce back from failure, deal with feeling hurt or depressed, listen more attentively, express ourselves more clearly, and have the courage to pursue what really makes us happy so we can feel complete in ourselves.
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9780143132288
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Hardcover
Cambodian Voices
The Road of Lost Innocence
By Mam, Somaly
A portion of the proceeds of this book will be donated to the Somaly Mam Foundation.A riveting, raw, and beautiful memoir of tragedy and hopeBorn in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old. For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia. Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking - rape, torture, deprivation - until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker. Emboldened by her newfound freedom, education, and security, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind.Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, The Road of Lost Innocence recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls.
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9780385526210
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Print book
Filipino Voices
Dear America
By Vargas, Jose Antonio
THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER"This riveting, courageous memoir ought to be mandatory reading for every American." - Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow"l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured." - Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins"This book couldn't be more timely and more necessary." - Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of What Is the What and The Monk of MokhaPulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called "the most famous undocumented immigrant in America," tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms."This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book--at its core--is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can't. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom." - Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America
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9780062851352
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Hardcover
Afghan Voices
A Brief History Of Afghanistan
By Wahab, Shaista
Explores the history and culture of Afghanistan from prehistoric times through its current events, covering the political, cultural, and economic changes the country has undergone over the years.
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9780816057610
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The Dressmaker of Khair Khana
By Lemmon, Gayle Tzemach
The life Kamila Sidiqi had known changed overnight when the Taliban seized control of the city of Kabul. After receiving a teaching degree during the civil war - a rare achievement for any Afghan woman - Kamila was subsequently banned from school and confined to her home. When her father and brother were forced to flee the city, Kamila became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Armed only with grit and determination, she picked up a needle and thread and created a thriving business of her own. The Dressmaker of Khair Khana tells the incredible true story of this unlikely entrepreneur who mobilized her community under the Taliban. Former ABC News reporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon spent years on the ground reporting Kamila's story, and the result is an unusually intimate and unsanitized look at the daily lives of women in Afghanistan.
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9780061732379
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Hardcover
Zoya's Story
By Follain, John
Zoya's Story is a young woman's searing account of her clandestine war of resistance against the Taliban and religious fanaticism at the risk of her own life. An epic tale of fear and suffering, courage and hope, Zoya's Story is a powerful testament to the ongoing battle to cla
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9780060097820
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The Lovers
By Nordland, Rod
A riveting, real-life equivalent of The Kite Runner - an astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women's rights in the Muslim world.Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor. They are still in hiding.Despite a decade of American good intentions, women in Afghanistan are still subjected to some of the worst human rights violations in the world. Rod Nordland, then the Kabul bureau chief of the New York Times, had watched these abuses unfold for years when he came upon Zakia and Ali, and has not only chronicled their plight, but has also shepherded them from danger.The Lovers will do for women's rights generally what Malala's story did for women's education. It is an astonishing story about self-determination and the meaning of love that illustrates, as no policy book could, the limits of Western influence on fundamentalist Islamic culture and, at the same time, the need for change.
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9780062378828
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Print book
An American Bride in Kabul
By Chesler, Phyllis
Few westerners will ever be able to understand Muslim or Afghan society unless they are part of a Muslim family. Twenty years old and in love, Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish-American girl from Brooklyn, embarked on an adventure that has lasted for more than a half-century. In 1961, when she arrived in Kabul with her Afghan bridegroom, authorities took away her American passport. Chesler was now the property of her husband's family and had no rights of citizenship. Back in Afghanistan, her husband, a wealthy, westernized foreign college student with dreams of reforming his country, reverted to traditional and tribal customs. Chesler found herself unexpectedly trapped in a posh polygamous family, with no chance of escape. She fought against her seclusion and lack of freedom, her Afghan family's attempts to convert her from Judaism to Islam, and her husband's wish to permanently tie her to the country through childbirth.
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9780230342217
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Hardcover
Indian Voices
Victoria & Abdul
By Basu, Shrabani
Soon to be a Major Motion Picture starring Dame Judi Dench from director Stephen Frears, releasing September 22, 2017. Tall and handsome Abdul was just twenty-four years old when he arrived in England from Agra to wait at tables for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Within a year, Abdul had grown to become a powerful figure at court, the Queen's teacher, or Munshi, her counsel on Urdu and Indian affairs, and a friend close to the Queen's heart. "I am so very fond of him.," Queen Victoria would write in 1888, "He is so good and gentle and understanding....a real comfort to me." This marked the beginning of the most scandalous decade in Queen Victoria's long reign. Devastated first by the death of Prince Albert in 1861 and then her personal servant John Brown in 1883, Queen Victoria quickly found joy in an intense and controversial relationship with her Munshi, who traveled everywhere with her, cooked her curries and cultivated her understanding of the Indian sub-continent - a region, as Empress of India, she was long intrigued by but could never visit. The royal household roiled with resentment, but their devotion grew in defiance of all expectation and the societal pressures of their time and class and lasted until the Queen's death on January 22, 1901. Drawn from never-before-seen first-hand documents that had been closely guarded secrets for a century, Shrabani Basu's Victoria & Abdul is a remarkable history of the last years of the 19th century in English court, an unforgettable view onto the passions of an aging Queen, and a fascinating portrayal of how a young Indian Muslim came to play a central role at the heart of the British Empire.
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9780525434412
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Paperback
Milk and Honey
By Kaur, Rupi
Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. Milk and Honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
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9781449474256
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Print book
Love, Loss, and What We Ate
By Lakshmi, Padma
A vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph, Love, Loss, and What We Atetraces Padma Lakshmi s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron s HeartburnLong before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, never quite at home in the world, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother s kitchen in South India. Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the Top ChefJudges Table and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth to the man who was seemingly wrong for her in every way but proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external. Love, Loss, and What We Ateis an intimate and unexpected story of food and family both the ones we are born to and the ones we create and their enduring legacies. Praise for Love, Loss, and What We Ate Love, Loss, and What We Ate is the Padma we didn t know a frank, introspective look at a fascinating and unusual life. Surprisingly revealing and disarmingly bittersweet. Anthony Bourdain This vivid, generous, finely written memoir reveals the smart, vulnerable, and resourceful person behind the beautifully dressed judge telling the chefs to pack their knives and go home. And the recipes are great Francine Prose Beautifully written and moving, this book is also a feast for the senses that will leave you hungry for more. It paints an evocative picture on every page, and offers a wonderfully crafted landscape of the culinary textures and cultural touchstones that have shaped both the woman and her palate. Padma has given us something layered and lyrical an immigrant s journey, as well as a young woman s struggle to come into her own. In telling her own story with such grace and artistry, she has created something culturally important for us all. Susan Sarandon"
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9780062202611
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Print book
A Long Way Home
By Brierley, Saroo
The miraculous and triumphant story of a young man who rediscovers not only his childhood life and homebut an identity long-since left behind.At only five years old, Saroo Brierley got lost on a train in India. Unable to read or write or recall the name of his hometown or even his own last name, he survived alone for weeks on the rough streets of Calcutta before ultimately being transferred to an agency and adopted by a couple in Australia.Despite his gratitude, Brierley always wondered about his origins. Eventually, with the advent of Google Earth, he had the opportunity to look for the needle in a haystack he once called home, and pore over satellite images for landmarks he might recognize or mathematical equations that might further narrow down the labyrinthine map of India.
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9780399169281
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Hardcover
Uncle Swami
By Prashad, Vijay
Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center, misdirected assaults on Sikhs and other South Asians flared on streets across the nation, serving as harbingers of a more suspicious, less discerning, and increasingly fearful world view that would drastically change ideas of belonging and acceptance in America.Weaving together distinct strands of recent South Asian immigration to the United States, Uncle Swami creates a richly textured analysis of the systems and sentiments behind shifting notions of cultural identity in a post 9/11 world. Vijay Prashad continues the conversation sparked by his celebrated work The Karma of Brown Folk and confronts the experience of migration across an expanse of generations and class divisions, from the birth of political activism among second generation immigrants to the meteoric rise of South Asian American politicians in Republican circles to the migrant workers who suffer in the name of American capitalism.
Publisher: n/a
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9781595587848
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Hardcover
Maharanis
By Moore, Lucy
Here is a rare glimpse behind purdah's curtain into the lives of four brilliant maharanis-the wives of Maharajas-who helped shepherd princely India into the twentieth century. Tracing the lives of these influential women from the final days of the raj and the British Empire to the present, Lucy Moore vividly re-creates a splendid lost world as well as describes the growing pains of the emerging democratic society in India. Educated, nationalist Chimnabai, born in 1871, in the wake of the "Indian Mutiny" of 1857, began her marriage in purdah but broke it in 1913, and spent the rest of her life campaigning tirelessly for women's rights. The comparatively demure Sunity Devi was a favorite of the British aristocracy and made Queen Victoria the godmother of her son, Victor.
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9780670033683
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Print book
Pakistani Voices
Let Her Fly
By Yousafzai, Ziauddin
A moving and deeply personal memoir by Ziauddin Yousafzai, whose daughter, Malala, survived a near-fatal attack by the Taliban and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.Since her miraculous recovery from a bullet fired by the Taliban in 2012, Malala Yousafzai has spoken across the globe on behalf of women everywhere who are fighting for a right to education. Her mother Toor Pekai, calls this Malala's "second life." Malala has address the United Nations assembly on numerous occasions and, at sixteen, became the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, Malala studies politics and economics at the world-famous Oxford University in England. Sometimes, for a parent, a moment of true beauty, of marveling 'how can this extraordinary child be mine?!' finds its home in the seemingly most inconsequential of things. For Ziauddin Yousafzai, this moment occurred when Malala was served tea by the male principal of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford. All his life, Ziauddin had been taught that only women served tea and were meant to remain in the kitchen while the men drank. Now, their roles had changed. This moment at Oxford was so natural, so normal and therefore more beautiful to Ziauddin than any audience Malala might have had with a queen or a president. It proved what he wanted to believe: when you stand for a change, that change comes. WHAT LOVE TEACHES ME is an intimate confession by the father of one of our time's most remarkable leaders. Ziauddin shares what he's learned from Malala, and what he hopes to teach the world.
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9780316450508
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Hardcover
I Am Malala
By Yousafzai, Malala
A MEMOIR BY THE YOUNGEST RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE "I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday."When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she became a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.I AM MALALA is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.I AM MALALA will make you believe in the power of one person's voice to inspire change in the world.
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9780316322409
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Hardcover
Reconciliation
By Bhutto, Benazir
"It is impossible to understand todays world without knowing Pakistan; and impossible to understand Pakistan without reading this book. A courageous woman - tragically killed - speaks to us of reconciliation. We owe it to her - and to ourselves - to listen, comprehend, and act." - Madeleine Albright"One of the most gripping and important books of our era." - Walter Isaacson Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, after eight years of exile, hopeful that she could be a catalyst for change. Upon a tumultuous reception, she survived a suicide-bomb attack that killed nearly two hundred of her compatriots. But she continued to forge ahead, with more courage and conviction than ever, since she knew that time was running out - for the future of her nation and for her life.In Reconciliation, Bhutto recounts in gripping detail her final months in Pakistan and offers a bold new agenda for how to stem the tide of Islamic radicalism and to rediscover the values of tolerance and justice that lie at the heart of her religion. She speaks out not just to the West but also to the Muslims across the globe. Bhutto presents an image of modern Islam that defies the negative caricatures often seen in the West. After reading this book, it will become even clearer what the world has lost by her assassination
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9780061567582
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Hardcover
Three Cups of Tea
By Mortenson, Greg
In 1993, following a failed attempt to ascend K2, Greg Mortenson was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers in Pakistan and promised to build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time - Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.Award-winning journalist David Oliver Relin has collaborated on this spellbinding account of Mortenson's incredible accomplishments in a region where Americans are often feared and hated. Over the following decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring story of how one man really is changing the world - one school at a time.Make this your next book club selection and everyone saves. Get 15% off when you order 5 or more of this title for your book club.Simply enter the coupon code MORTENSONTHREE at checkout.This offer does not apply to eBook purchases. This offer applies to only one downloadable audio per purchase.Watch a Video
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9780143038252
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Hardcover
Iranian Voices
Between Two Worlds
By Saberi, Roxana
"Between Two Worlds is an extraordinary story of how an innocent young woman got caught up in the current of political events and met individuals whose stories vividly depict human rights violations in Iran." - Shirin Ebadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Between Two World is the harrowing chronicle of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi's imprisonment in Iran - as well as a penetrating look at Iran and its political tensions. Here for the first time is the full story of Saberi's arrest and imprisonment, which drew international attention as a cause clbre from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and leaders across the globe.
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9780061965289
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Hardcover
Lipstick Jihad
By Moaveni, Azadeh
As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Teh
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9781586481933
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Reading Lolita in Tehran
By Nafisi, Azar
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely–their stories intertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, as fundamentalists seized hold of the universities and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the women in Nafisi’s living room spoke not only of the books they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments.
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9780812979305
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Print book
Funny in Farsi
By Dumas, Firoozeh
This new Readers Circle edition includes a reading group guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.” In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
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9780812968378
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Paperback
Iraqi Voices
The Girl Who Escaped ISIS
By Khalaf, Farida
Named a "Best Book of the Year" by New York Post "Farida Khalaf's story is harrowing but crucial - especially when it comes to understanding what ISIS actually is and does." - Glamour "As gripping as it is appalling ... a compelling testament to the suffering of ordinary people caught up in violence far beyond their control - and to the particularly terrible price it exacts from women." - The GuardianA young Yazidi woman was living a normal, sheltered life in northern Iraq during the summer of 2014 when her entire world was upended: her village was attacked by ISIS. All of the men in her town were killed and the women were taken into slavery. This is Farida Khalaf's story. In unprecedented detail, Farida describes her world as it was - at nineteen, she was living at home with her brothers and parents, finishing her schooling and looking forward to becoming a math teacher - and the hell it became. Held in a slave market in Syria and sold into the homes of several ISIS soldiers, she stubbornly attempts resistance at every turn. Farida is ultimately brought to an ISIS training camp in the middle of the desert, where she plots an against-all-odds escape for herself and five other girls. A riveting firsthand account of life in captivity and a courageous flight to freedom, this astonishing memoir is also Farida's way of bearing witness, and of ensuring that ISIS does not succeed in crushing her spirit. Her bravery, resilience, and hope in the face of unimaginable violence will fascinate and inspire.
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9781501131714
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Hardcover
Saudi Arabian Voices
Inside the Kingdom
By Ladin, Carmen Bin
A former sister-in-law of Osama bin Ladin describes her experiences of marrying into and divorcing from the bin Ladin family, her witness to the clan's complex and secretive ways, and her sorrow over the September 11 attacks. 60,000 first printing.
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9780446577083
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Growing Up bin Laden
By Laden, Najwa Bin
Mother and son give us an extraordinary view of the private life of a man both loved and feared by his family.
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9780312560164
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Print book
Daring to Drive
By Al-sharif, Manal
A ferociously intimate memoir by a devout woman from a modest family in Saudi Arabia who became the unexpected leader of a courageous movement to support women's right to drive.Manal al-Sharif grew up in Mecca the second daughter of a taxi driver, born the year fundamentalism took hold. In her adolescence, she was a religious radical, melting her brother's boy band cassettes in the oven because music was haram: forbidden by Islamic law. But what a difference an education can make. By her twenties she was a computer security engineer, one of few women working in a desert compound that resembled suburban America. That's when the Saudi kingdom's contradictions became too much to bear: she was labeled a slut for chatting with male colleagues, her teenage brother chaperoned her on a business trip, and while she kept a car in her garage, she was forbidden from driving down city streets behind the wheel. Daring to Drive is the fiercely intimate memoir of an accidental activist, a powerfully vivid story of a young Muslim woman who stood up to a kingdom of men - and won. Writing on the cusp of history, Manal offers a rare glimpse into the lives of women in Saudi Arabia today. Her memoir is a remarkable celebration of resilience in the face of tyranny, the extraordinary power of education and female solidarity, and the difficulties, absurdities, and joys of making your voice heard.
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9781476793023
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Hardcover
In the Land of Invisible Women
By Ahmed, Qanta
"In this stunningly written book, a Western trained Muslim doctor brings alive what it means for a woman to live in the Saudi Kingdom. I've rarely experienced so vividly the shunning and shaming, racism and anti-Semitism, but the surprise is how Dr. Ahmed also finds tenderness at the tattered edges of extremism, and a life-changing pilgrimage back to her Muslim faith." - Gail SheehyThe decisions that change your life are often the most impulsive ones.Unexpectedly denied a visa to remain in the United States, Qanta Ahmed, a young British Muslim doctor, becomes an outcast in motion. On a whim, she accepts an exciting position in Saudi Arabia. This is not just a new job; this is a chance at adventure in an exotic land she thinks she understands, a place she hopes she will belong.
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9781402210877
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Paperback
Yemeni Voices
The Monk of Mokha
By Eggers, Dave
From the best-selling author of The Circle and What Is the What, the true story of a young Yemeni-American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana'a by civil war.Mokhtar Alkhanshali grew up in San Francisco, one of seven siblings brought up by Yemeni immigrants in a tiny apartment. At age twenty-four, unable to pay for college, he works as a doorman, until a chance encounter awakens his interest in coffee and its rich history in Yemen. Reinventing himself, he sets out to learn about coffee cultivation, roasting and importing. He travels to Yemen and visits farms in every corner of the country, collecting samples, eager to improve cultivation methods and help Yemeni farmers bring their coffee back to its former glory. And he is on the verge of success when civil war engulfs Yemen in 2015. The U.S. embassy closes, Saudi bombs begin to rain down on the country and Mokhtar is trapped in Yemen. This is a heart-pounding true story that weaves together the history of coffee, the struggles of everyday Yemenis living through civil war and the courageous journey of a young man--a Muslim and a U.S. citizen--following the most American of dreams.
**Please note, some of these titles are not written by persons of the specific culture, but represent histories of the culture as well as biographies about people of the culture.**
Encyclopedia of Modern Asia
By Christensen, Karen
The Encyclopedia of Modern Asia is a monumental new scholarly work, as expansive in scope as the continent of Asia itself. Under the direction of cultural anthropologist David Levinson, 800 contributors from around the world -- including 25 Asian countries -- provide 6, 000 articles on Modern Asia from a global perspective. The Encyclopedias comparative, cross-cultural approach allows students and researchers to identify the similarities and differences among Asian nations and religions. The work focuses on Asia in the modern world -- including Central Asia, the Middle East and the Far East -- and contemporary issues are given full and authoritative treatment. Historical articles emphasize people, places, events and developments that have had a lasting influence on Asia. Articles also cover Asian relations with Western nations, the relations between nations within Asia and also the flow of people, goods and ideas within Asia and globally. Also includes approximately 1, 000 black-and-white photographs, maps, sidebars and a comprehensive index.
Japanese Voices
They Called Us Enemy
By Takei, George
New York Times Bestseller!A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
Colors of Confinement
By Muller, Eric L.
In 1942, Bill Manbo (1908-1992) and his family were forced from their Hollywood home into the Japanese American internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, a technology then just seven years old, to capture community celebrations and to record his family's struggle to maintain a normal life under the harsh conditions of racial imprisonment. Colors of Confinement showcases sixty-five stunning images from this extremely rare collection of color photographs, presented along with three interpretive essays by leading scholars and a reflective, personal essay by a former Heart Mountain internee.The subjects of these haunting photos are the routine fare of an amateur photographer: parades, cultural events, people at play, Manbo's son. But the images are set against the backdrop of the barbed-wire enclosure surrounding the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and the dramatic expanse of Wyoming sky and landscape. The accompanying essays illuminate these scenes as they trace a tumultuous history unfolding just beyond the camera's lens, giving readers insight into Japanese American cultural life and the stark realities of life in the camps.Also contributing to the book are:Jasmine Alinder is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she coordinates the program in public history. In 2009 she published Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press) . She has also published articles and essays on photography and incarceration, including one on the work of contemporary photographer Patrick Nagatani in the newly released catalog Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani--Works, 1976-2006 (University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2009) . She is currently working on a book on photography and the law.Lon Kurashige is associate professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His scholarship focuses on racial ideologies, politics of identity, emigration and immigration, historiography, cultural enactments, and social reproduction, particularly as they pertain to Asians in the United States. His exploration of Japanese American assimilation and cultural retention, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990 (University of California Press, 2002) , won the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2004. He has published essays and reviews on the incarceration of Japanese Americans and has coedited with Alice Yang Murray an anthology of documents and essays, Major Problems in Asian American History (Cengage, 2003) .Bacon Sakatani was born to immigrant Japanese parents in El Monte, California, twenty miles east of Los Angeles, in 1929. From the first through the fifth grade, he attended a segregated school for Hispanics and Japanese. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, his family was confined at Pomona Assembly Center and then later transferred to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. When the war ended in 1945, his family relocated to Idaho and then returned to California. He graduated from Mount San Antonio Community College. Soon after the Korean War began, he served with the U.S. Army Engineers in Korea. He held a variety of jobs but learned computer programming and retired from that career in 1992. He has been active in Heart Mountain camp activities and with the Japanese American Korean War Veterans.
Farewell to Manzanar
By Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki
During World War II a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew. For her father it was essentially the end of his life. At age thirty-seven, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalls life at Manzanar through the eyes of the child she was. She tells of her fear, confusion, and bewilderment as well as the dignity and great resourcefulness of people in oppressive and demeaning circumstances.
Chinese Voices
Where the Past Begins
By Tan, Amy
FROM NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR AMY TAN, A MEMOIR ON HER LIFE AS A WRITER, HER CHILDHOOD, AND THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FICTION AND EMOTIONAL MEMORYIn Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels. Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia - the real reason behind an IQ test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother - and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Supplied with candor and characteristic humor, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer's mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning.
My Chinese-America
By Gee, Allen
Eloquently written essays about aspects of Asian American life comprise this collection that looks at how Asian-Americans view themselves in light of Americas insensitivities, stereotypes, and expectations. My Chinese-America speaks on masculinity, identity, and topics ranging from Jeremy Lin and immigration to profiling and Asian silences. This essays have an intimacy that transcends cultural boundaries, and casts light on a vital part of American culture that surrounds and influences all of us.,
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
By Chua, Amy
An awe-inspiring often hilarious and unerringly honest story of one mothers exercise in extreme parenting revealing the rewards-and the costs-of raising her children the Chinese way All decent parents want to do whats best for their children What Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reveals is that the Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that Western parents try to respect their childrens individuality encouraging them to pursue their true passions and providing a nurturing environment The Chinese believe that the best way to protect your children is by preparing them for the future and arming them with skills strong work habits and inner confidence Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother chronicles Chuas iron-willed decision to raise her daughters Sophia and Lulu her way-the Chinese way-and the remarkable results her choice inspires Here are some things Amy Chua would never allow her daughters to do bull have a playdate bull be in a school play bull complain about not being in a school play bull not be the student in every subject except gym and drama bull play any instrument other than the piano or violin bull not play the piano or violin The truth is Lulu and Sophia would never have had time for a playdate They were too busy practicing their instruments two to three hours a day and double sessions on the weekend and perfecting their Mandarin Of course no one is perfect including Chua herself Witness this scene According to Sophia here are three things I actually said to her at the piano as I supervised her practicing Oh my God youre just getting worse and worse Im going to count to three then I want musicality If the next times not PERFECT Im going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them But Chua demands as much of herself as she does of her daughters And in her sacrifices-the exacting attention spent studying her daughters performances the office hours lost shuttling the girls to lessons-the depth of her love for her children becomes clear Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an eye-opening exploration of the differences in Eastern and Western parenting--and the lessons parents and children everywhere teach one another.
365 Days For Travelers - Wisdom from Chinese Literary and Buddhist Classics
By Various,
A daybook of readings from the Chinese and Buddhist tradition in English and Chinese side-by-side
Vietnamese Voices
The Unwinding of the Miracle
By Yip-williams, Julie
As a young mother facing a terminal diagnosis, Julie Yip-Williams began to write her story, a story like no other. What began as the chronicle of an imminent and early death became something much more - a powerful exhortation to the living. That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Born blind in Vietnam, she narrowly escaped euthanasia at the hands of her grandmother, only to flee with her family the political upheaval of her country in the late 1970s. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. She would go on to become a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, and a life she had once assumed would be impossible. Then, at age thirty-seven, with two little girls at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it - a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining. Motherhood, marriage, the immigrant experience, ambition, love, wanderlust, tennis, fortune-tellers, grief, reincarnation, jealousy, comfort, pain, the marvel of the body in full rebellion - this book is as sprawling and majestic as the life it records. It is inspiring and instructive, delightful and shattering. It is a book of indelible moments, seared deep - an incomparable guide to living vividly by facing hard truths consciously. With humor, bracing honesty, and the cleansing power of well-deployed anger, Julie Yip-Williams set the stage for her lasting legacy and one final miracle: the story of her life.
Fire Road
By Thi, Kim Phuc Phan
Get out! Run! We must leave this place! They are going to destroy this whole place! Go, children, run first! Go now!These were the final shouts nine year-old Kim Phuc heard before her world dissolved into flames -- before napalm bombs fell from the sky, burning away her clothing and searing deep into her skin. It's a moment forever captured, an iconic image that has come to define the horror and violence of the Vietnam War. Kim was left for dead in a morgue; no one expected her to survive the attack. Napalm meant fire, and fire meant death.Against all odds, Kim lived -- but her journey toward healing was only beginning. When the napalm bombs dropped, everything Kim knew and relied on exploded along with them: her home, her country's freedom, her childhood innocence and happiness.
Korean Voices
A Thousand Miles to Freedom
By Kim, Eunsun
Eunsun Kim was born in North Korea, one of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. As a child Eunsun loved her country...despite her school field trips to public executions, daily self-criticism sessions, and the increasing gnaw of hunger as the country-wide famine escalated.By the time she was eleven years old, Eunsun's father and grandparents had died of starvation, and Eunsun was in danger of the same. Finally, her mother decided to escape North Korea with Eunsun and her sister, not knowing that they were embarking on a journey that would take them nine long years to complete. Before finally reaching South Korea and freedom, Eunsun and her family would live homeless, fall into the hands of Chinese human traffickers, survive a North Korean labor camp, and cross the deserts of Mongolia on foot.Now, Eunsun is sharing her remarkable story to give voice to the tens of millions of North Koreans still suffering in silence. Told with grace and courage, her memoir is a riveting expos of North Korea's totalitarian regime and, ultimately, a testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit.
North Korea Undercover
By Sweeney, John
An authoritative and, at times, frightening investigation into the dark side of North Korean society. North Korea is like no other tyranny on earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation on earth. Big Brother is always watching: It is Orwell's 1984 made reality. Award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney is one of the few foreign journalists to have witnessed the devastating reality of life in the controversial and isolated nation of North Korea, having entered the country undercover, posing as a university professor with a group of students from the London School of Economics. Huge factories with no staff or electricity; hospitals with no patients; uniformed child soldiers; and the world-famous and eerily empty DMZ -- the DeMilitarized Zone, where North Korea ends and South Korea begins -- all framed by the relentless flow of regime propaganda from omnipresent loudspeakers.
All You Can Ever Know
By Chung, Nicole
A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection An Official Junior Library Guild Selection An ABA Indies Introduce Selection "This book moved me to my very core. As in all her writing, Nicole Chung speaks eloquently and honestly about her own personal story, then widens her aperture to illuminate all of us. All You Can Ever Know is full of insights on race, motherhood, and family of all kinds, but what sets it apart is the compassion Chung brings to every facet of her search for identity and every person portrayed in these pages. This book should be required reading for anyone who has ever had, wanted, or found a family -- which is to say, everyone." -- Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere "An urgent, incandescent exploration of what it can mean to love, and of who gets to belong, in an increasingly divided country. Nicole Chung's powerful All You Can Ever Know is necessary reading, a dazzling light to help lead the way during these times." -- R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries What does it mean to lose your roots -- within your culture, within your family -- and what happens when you find them? Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up -- facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn't see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from -- she wondered if the story she'd been told was the whole truth. With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets -- vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
Love for Imperfect Things
By Hyemin,
A #1 internationally bestselling book of spiritual wisdom about learning to love ourselves, with all our imperfections, by the Buddhist author of The Things You Can See Only When You Slow DownWhen you care for yourself first, the world begins to find you worthy of care.No one is perfect, but that shouldn't hold us back from love--for the world, for one another, or even for ourselves. In this beautifully illustrated guide, Buddhist teacher Haemin Sunim (whose name means "spontaneous wisdom") draws on examples from his own life and on his years of helping others to introduce us to the art of self-care. When we treat ourselves with compassion, empathy, and forgiveness, we learn to treat others the same way, allowing us to connect with people on a deeper level, bounce back from failure, deal with feeling hurt or depressed, listen more attentively, express ourselves more clearly, and have the courage to pursue what really makes us happy so we can feel complete in ourselves.
Cambodian Voices
The Road of Lost Innocence
By Mam, Somaly
A portion of the proceeds of this book will be donated to the Somaly Mam Foundation.A riveting, raw, and beautiful memoir of tragedy and hopeBorn in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old. For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia. Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking - rape, torture, deprivation - until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker. Emboldened by her newfound freedom, education, and security, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind.Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, The Road of Lost Innocence recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls.
Filipino Voices
Dear America
By Vargas, Jose Antonio
THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER"This riveting, courageous memoir ought to be mandatory reading for every American." - Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow"l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured." - Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins"This book couldn't be more timely and more necessary." - Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of What Is the What and The Monk of MokhaPulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called "the most famous undocumented immigrant in America," tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms."This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book--at its core--is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can't. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom." - Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America
Afghan Voices
A Brief History Of Afghanistan
By Wahab, Shaista
Explores the history and culture of Afghanistan from prehistoric times through its current events, covering the political, cultural, and economic changes the country has undergone over the years.
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana
By Lemmon, Gayle Tzemach
The life Kamila Sidiqi had known changed overnight when the Taliban seized control of the city of Kabul. After receiving a teaching degree during the civil war - a rare achievement for any Afghan woman - Kamila was subsequently banned from school and confined to her home. When her father and brother were forced to flee the city, Kamila became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Armed only with grit and determination, she picked up a needle and thread and created a thriving business of her own. The Dressmaker of Khair Khana tells the incredible true story of this unlikely entrepreneur who mobilized her community under the Taliban. Former ABC News reporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon spent years on the ground reporting Kamila's story, and the result is an unusually intimate and unsanitized look at the daily lives of women in Afghanistan.
Zoya's Story
By Follain, John
Zoya's Story is a young woman's searing account of her clandestine war of resistance against the Taliban and religious fanaticism at the risk of her own life. An epic tale of fear and suffering, courage and hope, Zoya's Story is a powerful testament to the ongoing battle to cla
The Lovers
By Nordland, Rod
A riveting, real-life equivalent of The Kite Runner - an astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women's rights in the Muslim world.Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor. They are still in hiding.Despite a decade of American good intentions, women in Afghanistan are still subjected to some of the worst human rights violations in the world. Rod Nordland, then the Kabul bureau chief of the New York Times, had watched these abuses unfold for years when he came upon Zakia and Ali, and has not only chronicled their plight, but has also shepherded them from danger.The Lovers will do for women's rights generally what Malala's story did for women's education. It is an astonishing story about self-determination and the meaning of love that illustrates, as no policy book could, the limits of Western influence on fundamentalist Islamic culture and, at the same time, the need for change.
An American Bride in Kabul
By Chesler, Phyllis
Few westerners will ever be able to understand Muslim or Afghan society unless they are part of a Muslim family. Twenty years old and in love, Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish-American girl from Brooklyn, embarked on an adventure that has lasted for more than a half-century. In 1961, when she arrived in Kabul with her Afghan bridegroom, authorities took away her American passport. Chesler was now the property of her husband's family and had no rights of citizenship. Back in Afghanistan, her husband, a wealthy, westernized foreign college student with dreams of reforming his country, reverted to traditional and tribal customs. Chesler found herself unexpectedly trapped in a posh polygamous family, with no chance of escape. She fought against her seclusion and lack of freedom, her Afghan family's attempts to convert her from Judaism to Islam, and her husband's wish to permanently tie her to the country through childbirth.
Indian Voices
Victoria & Abdul
By Basu, Shrabani
Soon to be a Major Motion Picture starring Dame Judi Dench from director Stephen Frears, releasing September 22, 2017. Tall and handsome Abdul was just twenty-four years old when he arrived in England from Agra to wait at tables for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Within a year, Abdul had grown to become a powerful figure at court, the Queen's teacher, or Munshi, her counsel on Urdu and Indian affairs, and a friend close to the Queen's heart. "I am so very fond of him.," Queen Victoria would write in 1888, "He is so good and gentle and understanding....a real comfort to me." This marked the beginning of the most scandalous decade in Queen Victoria's long reign. Devastated first by the death of Prince Albert in 1861 and then her personal servant John Brown in 1883, Queen Victoria quickly found joy in an intense and controversial relationship with her Munshi, who traveled everywhere with her, cooked her curries and cultivated her understanding of the Indian sub-continent - a region, as Empress of India, she was long intrigued by but could never visit. The royal household roiled with resentment, but their devotion grew in defiance of all expectation and the societal pressures of their time and class and lasted until the Queen's death on January 22, 1901. Drawn from never-before-seen first-hand documents that had been closely guarded secrets for a century, Shrabani Basu's Victoria & Abdul is a remarkable history of the last years of the 19th century in English court, an unforgettable view onto the passions of an aging Queen, and a fascinating portrayal of how a young Indian Muslim came to play a central role at the heart of the British Empire.
Milk and Honey
By Kaur, Rupi
Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. Milk and Honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
Love, Loss, and What We Ate
By Lakshmi, Padma
A vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph, Love, Loss, and What We Atetraces Padma Lakshmi s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron s HeartburnLong before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, never quite at home in the world, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother s kitchen in South India. Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the Top ChefJudges Table and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth to the man who was seemingly wrong for her in every way but proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external. Love, Loss, and What We Ateis an intimate and unexpected story of food and family both the ones we are born to and the ones we create and their enduring legacies. Praise for Love, Loss, and What We Ate Love, Loss, and What We Ate is the Padma we didn t know a frank, introspective look at a fascinating and unusual life. Surprisingly revealing and disarmingly bittersweet. Anthony Bourdain This vivid, generous, finely written memoir reveals the smart, vulnerable, and resourceful person behind the beautifully dressed judge telling the chefs to pack their knives and go home. And the recipes are great Francine Prose Beautifully written and moving, this book is also a feast for the senses that will leave you hungry for more. It paints an evocative picture on every page, and offers a wonderfully crafted landscape of the culinary textures and cultural touchstones that have shaped both the woman and her palate. Padma has given us something layered and lyrical an immigrant s journey, as well as a young woman s struggle to come into her own. In telling her own story with such grace and artistry, she has created something culturally important for us all. Susan Sarandon"
A Long Way Home
By Brierley, Saroo
The miraculous and triumphant story of a young man who rediscovers not only his childhood life and homebut an identity long-since left behind.At only five years old, Saroo Brierley got lost on a train in India. Unable to read or write or recall the name of his hometown or even his own last name, he survived alone for weeks on the rough streets of Calcutta before ultimately being transferred to an agency and adopted by a couple in Australia.Despite his gratitude, Brierley always wondered about his origins. Eventually, with the advent of Google Earth, he had the opportunity to look for the needle in a haystack he once called home, and pore over satellite images for landmarks he might recognize or mathematical equations that might further narrow down the labyrinthine map of India.
Uncle Swami
By Prashad, Vijay
Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center, misdirected assaults on Sikhs and other South Asians flared on streets across the nation, serving as harbingers of a more suspicious, less discerning, and increasingly fearful world view that would drastically change ideas of belonging and acceptance in America.Weaving together distinct strands of recent South Asian immigration to the United States, Uncle Swami creates a richly textured analysis of the systems and sentiments behind shifting notions of cultural identity in a post 9/11 world. Vijay Prashad continues the conversation sparked by his celebrated work The Karma of Brown Folk and confronts the experience of migration across an expanse of generations and class divisions, from the birth of political activism among second generation immigrants to the meteoric rise of South Asian American politicians in Republican circles to the migrant workers who suffer in the name of American capitalism.
Maharanis
By Moore, Lucy
Here is a rare glimpse behind purdah's curtain into the lives of four brilliant maharanis-the wives of Maharajas-who helped shepherd princely India into the twentieth century. Tracing the lives of these influential women from the final days of the raj and the British Empire to the present, Lucy Moore vividly re-creates a splendid lost world as well as describes the growing pains of the emerging democratic society in India. Educated, nationalist Chimnabai, born in 1871, in the wake of the "Indian Mutiny" of 1857, began her marriage in purdah but broke it in 1913, and spent the rest of her life campaigning tirelessly for women's rights. The comparatively demure Sunity Devi was a favorite of the British aristocracy and made Queen Victoria the godmother of her son, Victor.
Pakistani Voices
Let Her Fly
By Yousafzai, Ziauddin
A moving and deeply personal memoir by Ziauddin Yousafzai, whose daughter, Malala, survived a near-fatal attack by the Taliban and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.Since her miraculous recovery from a bullet fired by the Taliban in 2012, Malala Yousafzai has spoken across the globe on behalf of women everywhere who are fighting for a right to education. Her mother Toor Pekai, calls this Malala's "second life." Malala has address the United Nations assembly on numerous occasions and, at sixteen, became the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, Malala studies politics and economics at the world-famous Oxford University in England. Sometimes, for a parent, a moment of true beauty, of marveling 'how can this extraordinary child be mine?!' finds its home in the seemingly most inconsequential of things. For Ziauddin Yousafzai, this moment occurred when Malala was served tea by the male principal of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford. All his life, Ziauddin had been taught that only women served tea and were meant to remain in the kitchen while the men drank. Now, their roles had changed. This moment at Oxford was so natural, so normal and therefore more beautiful to Ziauddin than any audience Malala might have had with a queen or a president. It proved what he wanted to believe: when you stand for a change, that change comes. WHAT LOVE TEACHES ME is an intimate confession by the father of one of our time's most remarkable leaders. Ziauddin shares what he's learned from Malala, and what he hopes to teach the world.
I Am Malala
By Yousafzai, Malala
A MEMOIR BY THE YOUNGEST RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE "I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday."When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she became a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.I AM MALALA is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.I AM MALALA will make you believe in the power of one person's voice to inspire change in the world.
Reconciliation
By Bhutto, Benazir
"It is impossible to understand todays world without knowing Pakistan; and impossible to understand Pakistan without reading this book. A courageous woman - tragically killed - speaks to us of reconciliation. We owe it to her - and to ourselves - to listen, comprehend, and act." - Madeleine Albright"One of the most gripping and important books of our era." - Walter Isaacson Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, after eight years of exile, hopeful that she could be a catalyst for change. Upon a tumultuous reception, she survived a suicide-bomb attack that killed nearly two hundred of her compatriots. But she continued to forge ahead, with more courage and conviction than ever, since she knew that time was running out - for the future of her nation and for her life.In Reconciliation, Bhutto recounts in gripping detail her final months in Pakistan and offers a bold new agenda for how to stem the tide of Islamic radicalism and to rediscover the values of tolerance and justice that lie at the heart of her religion. She speaks out not just to the West but also to the Muslims across the globe. Bhutto presents an image of modern Islam that defies the negative caricatures often seen in the West. After reading this book, it will become even clearer what the world has lost by her assassination
Three Cups of Tea
By Mortenson, Greg
In 1993, following a failed attempt to ascend K2, Greg Mortenson was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers in Pakistan and promised to build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time - Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.Award-winning journalist David Oliver Relin has collaborated on this spellbinding account of Mortenson's incredible accomplishments in a region where Americans are often feared and hated. Over the following decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring story of how one man really is changing the world - one school at a time.Make this your next book club selection and everyone saves. Get 15% off when you order 5 or more of this title for your book club.Simply enter the coupon code MORTENSONTHREE at checkout.This offer does not apply to eBook purchases. This offer applies to only one downloadable audio per purchase.Watch a Video
Iranian Voices
Between Two Worlds
By Saberi, Roxana
"Between Two Worlds is an extraordinary story of how an innocent young woman got caught up in the current of political events and met individuals whose stories vividly depict human rights violations in Iran." - Shirin Ebadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Between Two World is the harrowing chronicle of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi's imprisonment in Iran - as well as a penetrating look at Iran and its political tensions. Here for the first time is the full story of Saberi's arrest and imprisonment, which drew international attention as a cause clbre from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and leaders across the globe.
Lipstick Jihad
By Moaveni, Azadeh
As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Teh
Reading Lolita in Tehran
By Nafisi, Azar
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely–their stories intertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, as fundamentalists seized hold of the universities and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the women in Nafisi’s living room spoke not only of the books they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments.
Funny in Farsi
By Dumas, Firoozeh
This new Readers Circle edition includes a reading group guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.” In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
Iraqi Voices
The Girl Who Escaped ISIS
By Khalaf, Farida
Named a "Best Book of the Year" by New York Post "Farida Khalaf's story is harrowing but crucial - especially when it comes to understanding what ISIS actually is and does." - Glamour "As gripping as it is appalling ... a compelling testament to the suffering of ordinary people caught up in violence far beyond their control - and to the particularly terrible price it exacts from women." - The GuardianA young Yazidi woman was living a normal, sheltered life in northern Iraq during the summer of 2014 when her entire world was upended: her village was attacked by ISIS. All of the men in her town were killed and the women were taken into slavery. This is Farida Khalaf's story. In unprecedented detail, Farida describes her world as it was - at nineteen, she was living at home with her brothers and parents, finishing her schooling and looking forward to becoming a math teacher - and the hell it became. Held in a slave market in Syria and sold into the homes of several ISIS soldiers, she stubbornly attempts resistance at every turn. Farida is ultimately brought to an ISIS training camp in the middle of the desert, where she plots an against-all-odds escape for herself and five other girls. A riveting firsthand account of life in captivity and a courageous flight to freedom, this astonishing memoir is also Farida's way of bearing witness, and of ensuring that ISIS does not succeed in crushing her spirit. Her bravery, resilience, and hope in the face of unimaginable violence will fascinate and inspire.
Saudi Arabian Voices
Inside the Kingdom
By Ladin, Carmen Bin
A former sister-in-law of Osama bin Ladin describes her experiences of marrying into and divorcing from the bin Ladin family, her witness to the clan's complex and secretive ways, and her sorrow over the September 11 attacks. 60,000 first printing.
Growing Up bin Laden
By Laden, Najwa Bin
Mother and son give us an extraordinary view of the private life of a man both loved and feared by his family.
Daring to Drive
By Al-sharif, Manal
A ferociously intimate memoir by a devout woman from a modest family in Saudi Arabia who became the unexpected leader of a courageous movement to support women's right to drive.Manal al-Sharif grew up in Mecca the second daughter of a taxi driver, born the year fundamentalism took hold. In her adolescence, she was a religious radical, melting her brother's boy band cassettes in the oven because music was haram: forbidden by Islamic law. But what a difference an education can make. By her twenties she was a computer security engineer, one of few women working in a desert compound that resembled suburban America. That's when the Saudi kingdom's contradictions became too much to bear: she was labeled a slut for chatting with male colleagues, her teenage brother chaperoned her on a business trip, and while she kept a car in her garage, she was forbidden from driving down city streets behind the wheel. Daring to Drive is the fiercely intimate memoir of an accidental activist, a powerfully vivid story of a young Muslim woman who stood up to a kingdom of men - and won. Writing on the cusp of history, Manal offers a rare glimpse into the lives of women in Saudi Arabia today. Her memoir is a remarkable celebration of resilience in the face of tyranny, the extraordinary power of education and female solidarity, and the difficulties, absurdities, and joys of making your voice heard.
In the Land of Invisible Women
By Ahmed, Qanta
"In this stunningly written book, a Western trained Muslim doctor brings alive what it means for a woman to live in the Saudi Kingdom. I've rarely experienced so vividly the shunning and shaming, racism and anti-Semitism, but the surprise is how Dr. Ahmed also finds tenderness at the tattered edges of extremism, and a life-changing pilgrimage back to her Muslim faith." - Gail SheehyThe decisions that change your life are often the most impulsive ones.Unexpectedly denied a visa to remain in the United States, Qanta Ahmed, a young British Muslim doctor, becomes an outcast in motion. On a whim, she accepts an exciting position in Saudi Arabia. This is not just a new job; this is a chance at adventure in an exotic land she thinks she understands, a place she hopes she will belong.
Yemeni Voices
The Monk of Mokha
By Eggers, Dave
From the best-selling author of The Circle and What Is the What, the true story of a young Yemeni-American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee but finds himself trapped in Sana'a by civil war.Mokhtar Alkhanshali grew up in San Francisco, one of seven siblings brought up by Yemeni immigrants in a tiny apartment. At age twenty-four, unable to pay for college, he works as a doorman, until a chance encounter awakens his interest in coffee and its rich history in Yemen. Reinventing himself, he sets out to learn about coffee cultivation, roasting and importing. He travels to Yemen and visits farms in every corner of the country, collecting samples, eager to improve cultivation methods and help Yemeni farmers bring their coffee back to its former glory. And he is on the verge of success when civil war engulfs Yemen in 2015. The U.S. embassy closes, Saudi bombs begin to rain down on the country and Mokhtar is trapped in Yemen. This is a heart-pounding true story that weaves together the history of coffee, the struggles of everyday Yemenis living through civil war and the courageous journey of a young man--a Muslim and a U.S. citizen--following the most American of dreams.