Asian-American Books

A young boy's Korean grandmother comes to live with them in America.Mike's grandmother is always thinking and dreaming of her life back in Korea. Mike's family owns a food cart that they bring out and park at the corner of the park. They sell Bagels, OJ, Hot Dogs, chips, soda and pizza at their cart. Soon other carts come and sell the same kinds of things that Mike's family's cart sells. With too much competition they sell less food and wonder what they can keep their cart.

One evening while cooking dinner with is grandmother they come up with a terrific idea, Grandma and Mike get up early and make Korean food and when his parents wake up they tell them that today we have a new menu, we're going to sell Korean food today. Mike draws a sign that says Have a good Day Cafe for their food cart.

I like on the very last page they have Learn about the Koren Words in this story. They show the Korean writing and also how to pronounce the words as well as the Korean dishes.

It's some very nice translations of original Chinese texts with good intros to set the stage and give some background of what you're about to read. And each text is properly referenced so one can understand context better. A really quite fascinating look and Chinese history and culture though the ages in, more or less, their own words.

Through essential imagery and intelligent word craft, Dr. David Rosen, Joel Weishaus, and illustrator Arthur Okamura have co-created a profoundly reflective work that is housed within the subtle, delicate lacework of human mystery as it is captured in glimpses by this seasoned collaboration of poets and artists. Because this is a collaborative work, we see not only an individual human path through haiku, but how these separate individual paths inform a higher mystery as they converge, separate, fall into sync, compliment one another, press each other into further discovery. This is a book to be read and reread, straight through or in bits and pieces, to thumb through over morning tea, close your eyes and point to a haiku to meditate with during the day.

Most significant to me is the authors' meditation not only on haiku as a poetic form, but as a means of healing. These poets offer individual testimony of moments of archetypal breadth that are captured through the expansive snapshot of haiku, from the pangs of the death of ego to the surrender of the death of loved ones; and how a plate of pancakes can remind us of old wisdom.

Diane Fujino accurately captures the strife of social injustices perpetrated by a nation that was and is still very much controlled by those who harbor deep rooted, yet carefully concealed, racist values. This is a fascinating read that follows the life of Yuri Kochiyama who was changed from an American with unquestioning loyalty to her country, into a TRUE American who stands up for the those persecuted in this nation for nothing more than belonging to a non-white race. Yuri was driven to question authority and speak out aganist the social injustices that had been all around her yet unnoticed until the bombing of Pearl Harbor highilghted the government sanctioned racism and unjustified persecution of her family and friends of Asian descent. This book applies every bit today as it did then.
A great read!

I thought this book was well written and provided me with a feeling of how it was to revist some of the places where the author served as a young man. I was surprised at how well paced it was.

This compilation on the Seleucid Empire calls for an interdisciplinary approach to studying the largest of the dynastic empires to follow Alexander The Great. The text is more of a scholarly review addressed primarily to people working in the field of classical studies, archeology, and anthropology. Although perhaps not a book that would be of interest to the casual reader of history, Susan Sherwin-White and Amelie Kurt are two of few historians who have bothered to question the commonly accepted theories as to the evolution of the Seleucid Empire.

Susan Sherwin-White and Amelie Kurt evaluate new findings that were made indicating that the Seleucid Empire was not simply a Greek culture and state that arose out of thin air to impose itself upon the Persian Empire's former subjects. Previous scholars have approached the subject with a flawed paradigm in concluding that Seleucid monarchs reinvented the wheel after Alexander's defeat of Persia by imposing a ruthless policy of colonialism and maintaining a society segregated between Greeks and non-Greeks. As a result, historians have been looking only at artifacts and texts reflecting Greek culture or values to make their conclusions while ignoring everything else. White and Khurt, along with respected scholars such as Erich Gruen, present and interpret new findings in numismatic, archeological, and textual areas to dispute this false paradigm such as cuneiform scripts used by Greeks, architectural fusion of Greek and Eastern styles, etc.

As with their other book 'From Samarkhand to Sardis', this book is a major contribution to the study of the Seleucids as previous scholars such as Tarn simply didn't have the knowledge of the major archeological finds that were uncovered after he published his works in the mid-twentieth century. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is seriously in need of important and recent information on the Seleucid empire. The book is hard to find and I recommend you get it as soon as it becomes available. It's possible that another edition is on the way but that may be long in the future if ever at all. Again, the book is not suited for the casual reader as one would at least need to have a thorough background on Alexander The Great if not Persian and Greek history: the book is primarily targeted towards an academic audience and not the general reader. The book is also expensive at $50+ and not really in the price range of someone who only has a limited interest in the subject. A very good book to go with this one is A. K. Narain's 'Coin Types of the Indo-Greek Kings" that focuses on the Seleucid kingdoms of the Indus valley and Bactria: its several studies focus primarily on numismatic evidence along with archeological and literary sources. The works and theories of the authors as to the development and administration of the Seleucid kingdoms complement each other and therefore make a great pair of books to own.

This book brings together stories of sadness and whimsy, exotic locales and a walk-up in Brooklyn. It represents new voices in fiction along with more established authors. One story finds a sheltered young Indian woman making love to a Guatemalan refugee who looks like a Mayan warlord; another story captures a young Indian woman DJ, out to make her mark on the music scene, finding connections to her Latina sisters in the sighs and hot breaths of history. Still another reveals the often ironic and subversive thoughts of a Canadian woman of Indian descent, married to a gentle WASP and finding her old disappointments fade against the warm glow of a peaceful marriage. Another one slyly describes an American in Bombay and the little girls who steal his toilet paper. I loved these stories, I loved their differences, and I wish that this book were more widely available because the stories aren't just about South Asian women, they're really about all of us.

This survey of the art of Hideo Date is published in conjunction with the Japanese-American National Museum and presents the artist's blend of Japanese and American painting. Gorgeous color paintings by a Japanese-American artist who survived the camps makes for a striking synthesis of styles and cultures.

We at the Sherpa Friendship Association recommend HIGH RELIGION first and foremost as the best Sherpa history book in English. Sherpa language itself is rarely written, but Ortner went to great lengths to locate original Sherpa histories actually written by educated Sherpa lamas. Her translations of the Sherpa migration (from Kham, Tibet) stories into English are wonderfully detailed, and her study of Sherpa clan politics, Sherpa Buddhist beliefs, and finance in the old Sherpa Kingdoms is more thorough than any other study before or since. Most of the research for this voume was conducted in Zhung Gompa (Junbesi) in SharKhumbu, the Southern Kingdom of the Sherpas. Surely Lama Dorje, the magical Sherpa Lama who founded Zhung Gompa, smiles upon this work!

"Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects" covers the macro historical, social, religious, and political highlights in Kashmir from about 1840 to 1950. It is a fascinating view into a world far distant but fearfully close as two modern nuclear armed adversaries seek domination over the mystical lands of Kashmir. This is a book of essential preliminary understandings to the current situation in the region and of the volumes I have encountered is the best. I hope the author contemplates another book dealing with the post 1947 era. For those seeking recent political happenings, I suggest "Kashmir" by Sumantra Bose.