Hutchins Library News Blog

Welcome to another edition of From Our Shelves, where I give you a short review of a book from our collections that I have read and hope you may consider reading as well. This week we are featuring Every Book Its Reader by Nicholas Basbanes. The book is arranged in 12 chapters, and the idea for the book comes from a 1963 exhibition at the British Museum celebrating five centuries of the written word. If you are a bibliophile, you will probably enjoy the book very much. More casual readers will find a pretty broad history of books that somehow had an impact on society and/or spurred some change. This book will give you a look at the power of books and reading. Basbanes considers the following premise about studying reading and readers as a field of study:

"A basic premise each follows is the idea that it is readers, not just authors, who give meaning to texts, and that there is value in knowing how individuals through history respond to them" (117). 

If you want to learn more and/or check the book out, you can find the library catalog details below. If you want find other books like this one or for other topics, you can always visit the library's reference desk.

Every Book Its Reader by Nicholas A. Basbanes

Call Number: Stacks 028.9 B297e 2005

ISBN: 9780060593230

Publication Date: 2005-11-29

Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have "made things happen" in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people. In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Henry James, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller -- even the notorious Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler -- by knowing what they have read. He shows how books that many of these people have consulted, in some cases annotated with their marginal notes, can offer tantalizing clues to the evolution of their character and the development of their thought. Taking the concept one step further, Basbanes profiles some of the most articulate readers of our time -- David McCullough, Harold Bloom, Robert Fagles, Robert Coles, Helen Vendler, Elaine Pagels, Daniel Aaron, Christopher Ricks, Matthew Bruccoli, and Perri Klass among them -- who discuss such relevant concepts as literary canons, classic works in translation, the timelessness of poetry, the formation of sacred texts, and the power of literature to train physicians, nurture children, and rehabilitate criminal offenders. "Basbanes has a deep and abiding passion for books -- a joyful addiction," Dan Smith wrote in the Toronto Star of Patience & Fortitude, characterizing his body of work as "part travelogue, part scholarship, and all story." The tradition continues with Every Book Its Reader.

Malcolm X Day is a U.S. holiday observed either on his birthday, May 19th, or on the third Friday in May. It is observed in some way in 16 states as of this post, often in specific cities and often with educational events and other activities.  

To honor the civil rights activist and leader on this day, I am highlighting some books and resources on Malcolm X and his times available at Hutchins Library.

Books listed below, in no particular order, are available here at the library. If you want to find more, you can visit the library website and use the library catalog to search for more books and other resources the library owns or can access. If you need assistance, you can contact or visit the reference desk.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley

Call Number: Stacks 305.896 X11a 1999

ISBN: 9780345350688

Publication Date: 1987-10-12

ONE OF TIME'S TEN MOST IMPORTANT NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America. Praise for The Autobiography of Malcolm X "Extraordinary . . . a brilliant, painful, important book."--The New York Times "This book will have a permanent place in the literature of the Afro-American struggle."--I. F. Stone

 

 

Malcolm X by Manning Marable; G. Valmont Thomas (Read by)

Call Number: Stacks 297.87 X11zm 2011

ISBN: 9780670022205

Publication Date: 2011-04-04

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year. Years in the making-the definitive biography of the legendary black activist. Of the great figures in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world. Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of the most singular forces for social change, capturing with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.

 

A Lie of Reinvention by Jared Ball (Editor); Todd Steven Burroughs (Editor)

Call Number: E-Book

ISBN: 9781574780512

Publication Date: 2013-07-01

A Lie of Reinvention is a response to Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention. Marable’s book was controversially acclaimed by some as his magna opus. At the same time, it was denounced and debated by others as a worthless read full of conjecture, errors, and without any new factual content. In this collection of critical essays, editors Jared Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs lead a group of established and emerging Black scholars and activists who take a clear stance in this controversy: Marable’s biography is at best flawed and at worst a major setback in American history, African American studies, and scholarship on the life of Malcolm X. In the tradition of John Henrik Clarke’s classic anthology "William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond,” this volume provides a striking critique of Marable’s text. In 1968, Clarke and his assembled writers felt it essential to respond to Styron’s fictionalized and ahistorical Nat Turner, the heroic leader of one of America’s most famous revolts against enslavement. In A Lie of Reinvention, the editors sense a different threat to an African American icon, Malcolm X. This time, the threat is presented as an authoritative biography. To counter the threat, Ball and Burroughs respond with a barbed collection of commentaries of Marable’s text. The essays come from all quarters of the Black community. From behind prison walls, Mumia Abu-Jamal revises his prior public praise of Marable’s book with an essay written specifically for this volume. A. Peter Bailey, a veteran journalist who worked with Malcolm X’s Organization for Afro-American Unity, disputes how he is characterized in Marable’s book. Bill Strickland, who also knew Malcolm X, provides what he calls a "personal critique” of the biography. Younger scholars such as Kali Akuno, Kamau Franklin, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Christopher M. Tinson, Eugene Puryear and Greg Thomas join veterans Rosmari Mealy, Raymond Winbush, Amiri Baraka and Karl Evanzz in pointing out historical problems and ideological misinterpretations in Marable’s work.

 

 

The Dead Are Arising by Les Payne; Tamara Payne

Call Number: Stacks 320.546 X11zp 2020

ISBN: 9781631491665

Publication Date: 2020-10-20

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X--all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is this historic biography that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, a work whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with purpose, as if the dead were truly arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting Malcolm's life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American history, the book traces the life of one of the twentieth century's most politically relevant figures "from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary." In tracing Malcolm X's life from his Nebraska birth in 1925 to his Harlem assassination in 1965, Payne provides searing vignettes culled from Malcolm's Depression-era youth, describing the influence of his Garveyite parents: his father, Earl, a circuit-riding preacher who was run over by a street car in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929, and his mother, Louise, who continued to instill black pride in her children after Earl's death. Filling each chapter with resonant drama, Payne follows Malcolm's exploits as a petty criminal in Boston and Harlem in the 1930s and early 1940s to his religious awakening and conversion to the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts penitentiary. With a biographer's unwavering determination, Payne corrects the historical record and delivers extraordinary revelations--from the unmasking of the mysterious NOI founder "Fard Muhammad," who preceded Elijah Muhammad; to a hair-rising scene, conveyed in cinematic detail, of Malcolm and Minister Jeremiah X Shabazz's 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK; to a minute-by-minute account of Malcolm X's murder at the Audubon Ballroom. Introduced by Payne's daughter and primary researcher, Tamara Payne, who, following her father's death, heroically completed the biography, The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.

 

The Sword and the Shield by Peniel E. Joseph

Call Number: Stacks 323.092 J835s 2020

ISBN: 9781541617865

Publication Date: 2020-03-31

This "landmark" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist) dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century's most iconic African American leaders   To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense versus nonviolence, black power versus civil rights, the sword versus the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. This is a strikingly revisionist biography, not only of Malcolm and Martin, but also of the movement and era they came to define.  

 

The Three Mothers by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Call Number: Stacks 306.874 T884t 2021

ISBN: 9781250756121

Publication Date: 2021-02-02

 Stamped from the Beginning Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. but virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them. In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes. Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women. These three extraordinary women passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning--from Louise teaching her children about their activist roots, to Berdis encouraging James to express himself through writing, to Alberta basing all of her lessons in faith and social justice. These women used their strength and motherhood to push their children toward greatness, all with a conviction that every human being deserves dignity and respect despite the rampant discrimination they faced. These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America's racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families' safety. The fight for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers. These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of Black motherhood long overdue.

 

Want to do some research on Malcolm X, his work and times? In addition to books and materials from the library collections, you could try using one of these databases available through the library website. Note that if you are off campus, you will be prompted to log in with your Berea College credentials to gain access.

 

• Academic Search Complete
• America: History and Life
• Ethnic Newswatch
• J-Stor

Here are some websites and freely available online resources that may be of interest.

• Want to research Malcolm X's papers? They are held at the New York Public Library (some materials may be digitized, check the site for details).
• Learn a bit more about the observance via the Zinn Education Project. They also offer other articles and resources on Malcolm X.
• Social Justice Books offers a list of books for teaching about Malcolm X from elementary school to adult nonfiction. You can check the library catalog to see which ones we may have.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May is a month when we can celebrate the heritage, accomplishments, and contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. The observance started as a Congressional joint resolution in 1978 calling for a week-long celebration of Asian and Pacific American heritage; President Carter signed the proclamation in 1979, and the first celebration happened on the week of May 4, 1979. Congress then passed legislation designating May as Asian Pacific American Month in 1992. President Obama in 2009 expanded the proclamation to include Pacific Islanders.

To celebrate, here is a small list of some books to read this month or any time. The books are not listed in any particular order, and they include fiction and nonfiction. If you want to find these and other books and resources, you can check the Library Catalog from our website.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (Illustrator)

Call Number: Graphic Novels 741.597 Y223a 2021

ISBN: 9781250811899

Publication Date: 2021-02-23

Original Series Now Available on Disney+ A tour-de-force by New York Times bestselling graphic novelist Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he's the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny's life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax. American Born Chinese is the winner of the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award, a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring, a 2007 Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year, and a New York Times bestseller.

 

 

They Called Us Enemy by Justin Eisenger; Steven Scott; George Takei

Call Number: Graphic Novels 940.531 T136t 2019

ISBN: 9781603094504

Publication Date: 2019-07-16

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.

 

 

Asian American Histories of the United States by Catherine Ceniza Choy

Call Number: Stacks 973.049 C552a 2022

ISBN: 9780807050798

Publication Date: 2022-08-02

An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history. Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare. Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the twenty-first century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. Choy traces how anti-Asian violence and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred, the erasure of Asian American experiences and contributions, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted are prominent themes in Asian American history. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century.

 

 

Another Appalachia by Neema Avashia

Call Number: Stacks 975.437 A946a 2022

ISBN: 9781952271427

Publication Date: 2022-03-30

When Neema Avashia tells people where she's from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving "There are Indian people in West Virginia?" A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles. Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia's identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole.

 

 

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

Call Number: Stacks 305.489 H772m 2020

ISBN: 9781984820365

Publication Date: 2020-02-25

Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.  With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.

 

 

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

Call Number: Graphic Novels 973.049 B932b 2017

ISBN: 9781419718779

Publication Date: 2017-03-07

An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family's journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui. This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent - the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.

 

 

Eating Asian America by Robert Ji-Song Ku (Editor); Martin F. Manalansan (Editor); Anita Mannur (Editor)

Call Number: Stacks 394.1209 E141 2013

ISBN: 9781479810239

Publication Date: 2013-09-23

Examines the ways our conceptions of Asian American food have been shaped Chop suey. Sushi. Curry. Adobo. Kimchi. The deep associations Asians in the United States have with food have become ingrained in the American popular imagination. So much so that contentious notions of ethnic authenticity and authority are marked by and argued around images and ideas of food. Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader collects burgeoning new scholarship in Asian American Studies that centers the study of foodways and culinary practices in our understanding of the racialized underpinnings of Asian Americanness. It does so by bringing together twenty scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum to inaugurate a new turn in food studies: the refusal to yield to a superficial multiculturalism that naively celebrates difference and reconciliation through the pleasures of food and eating. By focusing on multi-sited struggles across various spaces and times, the contributors to this anthology bring into focus the potent forces of class, racial, ethnic, sexual and gender inequalities that pervade and persist in the production of Asian American culinary and alimentary practices, ideas, and images. This is the first collection to consider the fraught itineraries of Asian American immigrant histories and how they are inscribed in the production and dissemination of ideas about Asian American foodways.

 

 

Shattered by Jeff Yang (Editor); Parry Shen (Editor); Keith Chow (Editor); Jerry Ma (Editor)

Call Number: Graphic Novels 741.597 S533 2012

ISBN: 9781595588241

Publication Date: 2012-11-06

Three years after the publication of the groundbreaking Asian American comics anthology Secret Identities, the same team is back with a new volume--bigger, bolder, and more breathtaking in scope. While the first collection focused on the conventions of superhero comics, this new book expands its horizon to include edgier genres, from hard-boiled pulp to horror, adventure, fantasy, and science fiction. Using this darker range of hues, it seeks to subvert--to shatter--the hidebound stereotypes that have obscured the Asian image since the earliest days of immigration: the stoic brute, the prodigious brain, the exotic temptress, the inscrutable alien, the devious manipulator. The eclectic and impressive lineup of contributors includes leading Asian American comics creators Bernard Chang (Supergirl), Sean Chen (Iron Man), Cliff Chiang (Wonder Woman), Larry Hama (G.I. Joe), Sonny Liew (Malinky Robot), Takeshi Miyazawa (Runaways), Christine Norrie (Hopeless Savages), Greg Pak (The Hulk), G.B. Tran (Vietnamerica), Gene Yang (American Born Chinese), and many others, as well as such film and literary standouts as Tanuj Chopra (Punching at the Sun), Michael Kang (The Motel), Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet), Gary Jackson (Missing You, Metropolis), and Bao Phi (Song I Sing). Their original graphic short stories cover topics from ethnic kiddie shows, China's AIDS policy, and airline security procedures to the untold backstory of Flash Gordon's nemesis Ming the Merciless and the gritty reality of a day in the life of a young Koreatown gangster. Shattered incorporates thrills, chills, and delights while exposing the hidden issues and vital truths of the nation's fastest-growing and most dynamic community.

 

 

Chains of Babylon by Daryl J. Maeda

Call Number: Stacks 305.895 M184c 2009

ISBN: 9780816648900

Publication Date: 2009-10-23

In Chains of Babylon, Daryl J. Maeda presents a cultural history of Asian American activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, showing how the movement created the category of "Asian American" to join Asians of many ethnicities in racial solidarity. Drawing on the Black Power and antiwar movements, Asian American radicals argued that all Asians in the United States should resist assimilation and band together to oppose racism within the country and imperialism abroad. As revealed in Maeda's in-depth work, the Asian American movement contended that people of all Asian ethnicities in the United States shared a common relationship to oppression and exploitation with each other and with other nonwhite peoples. In the early stages of the civil rights era, the possibility of assimilation was held out to Asian Americans under a model minority myth. Maeda insists that it was only in the disruption of that myth for both African Americans and Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s that the full Asian American culture and movement he describes could emerge. Maeda challenges accounts of the post-1968 era as hopelessly divisive by examining how racial and cultural identity enabled Asian Americans to see eye-to-eye with and support other groups of color in their campaigns for social justice. Asian American opposition to the war in Vietnam, unlike that of the broader antiwar movement, was predicated on understanding it as a racial, specifically anti-Asian genocide. Throughout he argues that cultural critiques of racism and imperialism, the twin "chains of Babylon" of the title, informed the construction of a multiethnic Asian American identity committed to interracial and transnational solidarity.

 

 

Asian-American Literature by Shirley Lim

Call Number: Stacks 820.808 A832

ISBN: 9780844217291

Publication Date: 2000-09-01

 

 

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Call Number: Fiction N57695sy

ISBN: 9780802123459

Publication Date: 2015-04-07

Now an HBO Limited Series from Executive Producers Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr., Streaming Exclusively on Max. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction "[A] remarkable debut novel." --Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review) Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, a startling debut novel from a powerful new voice featuring one of the most remarkable narrators of recent fiction: a conflicted subversive and idealist working as a double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.  The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

 

 

If you would like to do research  on Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and related topics, in addition to the library catalog, you could try the following databases and online resources accessible through the library website:

• Access World News, which offers full text from nearly 3,700 U.S. and 2,300 International newspapers.
• Academic Source Complete.
• Alt Press Watch.
• Ethnic Newswatch.
• J-Stor.
• Films on Demand, for videos and documentaries.

In addition if you want to learn more, here are some online resources freely available on the Internet:

• May: Asian American Pacific Islander Month overview at National Day Calendar.
• Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month history and overview at National Today.
• "Dear Educators, it's time to fight for Asian America" from Rethinking Schools.
• "Addressing Anti-Asian Bias" from Learning for Justice.
• "Asian Americans in the People's History of the United States" from Zinn Ed Project.
• Resources from the Federal Asian Pacific American Council.
• The Asian American Education Project.
• "Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month" spotlight from National Park Service.
• An Asian Pacific American "care package" from the Smithsonian.
• A list of "free learning resources to celebrate Asian American heritage" from Common Sense Education.