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American Paper Son
A Chinese Immigrant in the Midwest
Wayne Hung Wong
University of Illinois Press, 2005

In the early and mid-twentieth century, Chinese migrants evaded draconian anti-immigrant laws by entering the US under false papers that identified them as the sons of people who had returned to China to marry. Wayne Hung Wong tells the story of his life after emigrating to Wichita, Kansas, as a thirteen-year-old paper son. After working in his father’s restaurant as a teen, Wong served in an all-Chinese Air Force unit stationed in China during World War II. His account traces the impact of race and segregation on his service experience and follows his postwar life from finding a wife in Taishan through his involvement in the government’s amnesty program for Chinese immigrants and career in real estate. Throughout, Wong describes the realities of life as part of a small Chinese American community in a midwestern town.

Vivid and rich with poignant insights, American Paper Son explores twentieth-century Asian American history through one person’s experiences.

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Arts of Impoverishment
Beckett, Rothko, Resnais
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit
Harvard University Press, 1993

“How almost true they sometimes almost ring!” Samuel Beckett’s character rues his words. “How wanting in inanity!” A person could almost understand them! Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett’s writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko’s paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais’s films sometimes will? Why, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows us how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original—and profoundly anti-modernist—renunciation of art’s authority.

Our culture, while paying little attention to art, puts great faith in its edifying and enlightening value. Yet Beckett’s threadbare plays Company and Worstward Ho, so insistent on their poverty of meaning; Rothko’s nearly monochromatic paintings in the Houston Chapel; Resnais’s intensely self-contained, self-referential films Night and Fog and Muriel all seem to say, “I have little to show you, little to tell you, nothing to teach you.” Bersani and Dutoit consider these works as acts of resistance; by inhibiting our movement toward them, they purposely frustrate our faith in art as a way of appropriating and ultimately mastering reality.

As this book demonstrates, these artists train us in new modes of mobility, which differ from the moves of an appropriating consciousness. As a form of cultural resistance, a rejection of a view of reality—both objects and human subjects—as simply there for the taking, this training may even give birth to a new kind of political power, one paradoxically consistent with the renunciation of authority. In its movement among these three artists, Arts of Impoverishment traces a new form of movement within art.

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Evil & the Evidence For God
The Challenge of John Hick's Theodicy
R. Geivett
Temple University Press, 1995
"By appealing to recent scientific opinion that the universe may well have had an absolute beginning, Geivett develops an interesting, forceful argument for the rationality of belief in God. He then expounds the Augustinian free will theodicy and defends it against Hick's criticisms." --William L. Rowe How to reconcile the existence of evil with the belief in a benevolent God has long posed a philosophical problem to the system of Christian theism. John Hick's book, Evil and the Love of God, is perhaps the best known work to redress this difficulty in modern terms. Sharing Hick's interest in responding to the question of evil, R. Douglas Geivett constructs his own new "theodicy for today." But Geivett departs from Hick by embracing the Augustinian tradition of free will and returning the responsibility for evil to human beings themselves. Reviews "Moving from a comparison of the Irenaean and Augustinian traditions in theodicy to a powerfully original critique of Hick's influential 'soul-making' theodicy, Geivett presents a richly developed natural theology drawing on contemporary scientific opinion in support of an ex nihilo creation. Geivett's writing on natural theology is lucid and informed, honestly engaging many of that tradition's critics....This work is notable for its exceptionally thorough documentation and references, making it a valuable sourcebook for reflection on God and evil. A stimulating afterword by Hick himself significantly enriches this book's provocative analyses." --Religious Studies Review "Geivett details a natural theology and develops a way of understanding the existence of evil that places the fact of evil within, rather than in opposition to, a theistic view. Both the natural theology and the theodicy are rich and complex." --Keith E. Yandell, University of Wisconsin "In this interesting and worthwhile work, Geivett's statement of arguments in natural theology is fuller and fairer than that given by Hick in his writings. This book is an outstanding contribution to the field." --Richard L. Purtill, Western Washington University Contents Preface Part I: Two Traditions 1. The Problem of Evil 2. The Augustinian Tradition 3. John Hick's Theodicy Part II: Religious Epistemology 4. The Value of Natural Theology 5. The Danger of Dismissing Natural Theology 6. The Possibility of Natural Theology, Part 1: The Argument for a Non-Natural Reality 7. The Possibility of Natural Theology, Part 2: Personality, Power, and Providence 8. Explanation and Religious Ambiguity Part III: Theodicy Proper 9. John Hick's View of Divine Purpose 10. The Augustinian View of Divine Purpose 11. Free Will and Evil 12. Evil and the Afterlife Afterword by John Hick Notes Index About the Author(s) R. Douglas Geivett is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Biola University in La Mirada, California.
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Filming for the Future
The Work of Louis van Gasteren
Patricia Pisters
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
Louis Van Gasteren was one of the most prolific filmmakers in the history of the Netherlands, with a resume that includes nearly eighty documentaries and two feature films - to say nothing of artworks and books.
 
Filming for the Future offers an extended exploration of Van Gasteren's work and audio-visual world. Patricia Pisters introduces us to a filmmaker who always had his camera ready and was relentless in filming a wide range of topics and events of national and international importance. Fascinated by technology, deeply engaged with politics, and intensely occupied by the traumatic effects of war, Van Gasteren assembled an unparalleled record of life in twentieth-century Amsterdam and beyond. Filming for the Future will be an invaluable source of documentation and analysis of one of the key filmmakers of our time.
 
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A Fire You Can't Put Out
The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth
Andrew M. Manis
University of Alabama Press, 2001

When Fred Shuttlesworth suffered only a bump on the head in the 1956 bombing of his home, members of his church called it a miracle. Shuttlesworth took it as a sign that God would protect him on the mission that had made him a target that night. Standing in front of his demolished home, Shuttlesworth vigorously renewed his commitment to integrate Birmingham's buses, lunch counters, police force, and parks. The incident transformed him, in the eyes of Birmingham's blacks, from an up-and-coming young minister to a virtual folk hero and, in the view of white Birmingham, from obscurity to rabble-rouser extraordinaire.

From his 1956 founding of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights through the historic demonstrations of 1963, driven by a sense of divine mission, Shuttlesworth pressured Jim Crow restrictions in Birmingham with radically confrontational acts of courage. His intensive campaign pitted him against the staunchly segregationist police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor and ultimately brought him to the side of Martin Luther King Jr. and to the inner chambers of the Kennedy White House.

First published in 1999, Andrew Manis's award-winning biography of "one of the nation's most courageous freedom fighters" demonstrates compellingly that Shuttleworth's brand of fiery, outspoken confrontation derived from his prophetic understanding of the pastoral role. Civil rights activism was tantamount to salvation in his understanding of the role of Christian minister.


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Formal Methods and Empirical Practices
Conversations with Patrick Suppes
Roberta Ferrario and Viola Schiaffonati
CSLI, 2012
The philosopher Patrick Suppes has developed a unique and influential approach to studying the foundations of science—he combines an understanding of the main principles of scientific theories in axiomatic terms and formal models with a hands-on approach. While moving the study of the philosophy of science out of the parlor and into the lab, he often comes up with original results from the psychology of learning to the theory of measurement and quantum mechanics. This book searches for a common thread in Suppes’s multifaceted work through a series of conversations with the man himself and illuminates many of the more challenging aspects of his philosophy.
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How I Got Over
Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers
Willa Ward-Royster
Temple University Press, 2000
Lavishly illustrated with photographs from the author's collection, this book chronicles the world-famous Ward Singers' story from rural Anderson, South Carolina, to the streets of North Philadelphia and beyond. Told by Clara Ward's older sister, Willa, with the assistance of musician and writer Toni Rose, the Wards' story ranges over the joys and frustrations, triumphs and agonies of what it means to be simultaneously a family, an entertainment business enterprise, and a group with a mission to spread God's word.
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John H. Burdakin and the Grand Trunk Western Railroad
Mary Sharp
Michigan State University Press, 2016
John H. Burdakin and the Grand Trunk Western Railroad provides a look at the principles and personal values that guided John H. Burdakin through a long, successful career as a top manager at three railroads—the Pennsylvania, the Penn Central, and finally the Grand Trunk Western, where he was president of the regional carrier from 1974 to 1986. The book, written from interviews with Burdakin before his death in 2014, gives real-life examples of how Burdakin’s management principles and personal qualities helped him solve labor- management problems, update railroad technology, protect worker safety, and improve employee morale while managing a four thousand–person workforce. It introduces colorful characters who were involved in American railroads, as well as the serious, life-threatening issues that confronted railroads in the last half of the twentieth century in America. This book will provide insights for managers of any business as well as for those seeking to balance a successful career and a rewarding home life.
 
 
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John H. Burdakin
Railroader
Don L. Hofsommer
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Genuinely talented and successful managers in any field—business, government, military, academia—are scarce. John Howard Burdakin was a happy exception to the norm. This engaging biography examines Burdakin’s life in the railroad industry—at Pennsylvania Railroad, Penn Central, and finally at Grand Trunk Corporation—during a tumultuous time in the transportation business and underscores his core principles and how he employed them in the management of people and property. Some contemporary observers may consider Burdakin’s often conservative style as quite out of date, but a more sober assessment reveals that his approach has utility in any time and in any field. An excellent resource for leadership professionals, this study focuses on Burdakin’s career in management, ever stressing his foundational convictions—how he came by them, how he employed those principles as a manager, and how they were understood by those who worked for him or with him. Through teamwork, trust, hard work, honesty, diligence, and integrity, Burdakin would become respected as one of the railroad industry’s brightest guiding lights.
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Lala's Story
A Memoir of the Holocaust
Lala Fishman
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Winner of 1998 Carl Sandburg Award

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1932, Lala Weintraub grew up in Lvov, Poland. When the Nazis came, Lala—who had blond hair and blue eyes—survived by convincing them she was a Christian. This book tells her remarkable story. Fiercely determined and greatly aided by her Aryan looks, she managed to convince everyone—German soldiers, interrogators, fellow Poles—that she was a Polish gentile. Within a year after the Germans captured Lvov, many of Lala's family members were missing and presumed dead.

Lala's Story follows her as she moves from town to town, driven by her fear of being discovered. More than a story of survival, this is the story of a young girl's resolute struggle to defy, resist, and ultimately defeat the evil forces pursuing her.
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Lotman and Cultural Studies
Encounters and Extensions
Edited by Andreas Schonle
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
     One of the most widely read and translated theorists of the former Soviet Union, Yurii Lotman was a daring and imaginative thinker. A cofounder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, he analyzed a broad range of cultural phenomena, from the opposition between Russia and the West to the symbolic construction of space, from cinema to card playing, from the impact of theater on painting to the impact of landscape design on poetry. His insights have been particularly important in conceptualizing the creation of meaning and understanding the function of art and literature in society, and they have enriched the work of such diverse figures as Paul Ricoeur, Stephen Greenblatt, Umberto Eco, Wolfgang Iser, Julia Kristeva, and Frederic Jameson.
     In this volume, edited by Andreas Schönle, contributors extend Lotman's theories to a number of fields. Focusing on his less frequently studied later period, Lotman and Cultural Studies engages with such ideas as the "semiosphere," the fluid, dynamic semiotic environment out of which meaning emerges; "auto-communication," the way in which people create narratives about themselves that in turn shape their self-identity; change, as both gradual evolution and an abrupt, unpredictable "explosion"; power; law and mercy; Russia and the West; center and periphery.
     As William Mills Todd observes in his afterword, the contributors to this volume test Lotman's legacy in a new context: "Their research agendas-Iranian and American politics, contemporary Russian and Czech politics, sexuality and the body-are distant from Lotman's own, but his concepts and awareness yield invariably illuminating results."
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The Maverick and the Machine
Governor Dan Walker Tells His Story
Dan Walker
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
A reformer who was always colorful, provocative, and controversial, Dan Walker became a political maverick, taking on Mayor Richard J. Daley’s vaunted Chicago machine and the powerful incumbent Richard Ogilvie to become the governor of Illinois. The Maverick and the Machine tells the dramatic story of Walker’s rise from dirt-poor beginnings to the pinnacle of power in Illinois and his conviction on charges of bank fraud that landed him in federal prison. This frank volume also probes the inner sanctum of the governorship and reviews the investigations of Governor Blagojevich’s administration and the criminal trial of former governor George Ryan.
 
Best Memoir of 2008, San Diego Book Awards
Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence, 2008

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Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew
An Italian Story
Dan Vittorio Segre
University of Chicago Press, 2008
“I was probably less than five years old when my father fired a shot at my head.” From this first line, Dan Vittorio Segre’s memoir moves from one startling turning point to the next. The child of aristocratic parents, Segre fled Fascist Italy and Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws only to be thrust into the pioneering culture of Palestine, completely unprepared for the dangers of life in Israel during World War II. Beautifully narrated, Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew is an ironic, philosophical meditation on the historical reverberations of the twentieth century.
 
“Taut and illuminating . . . memorable . . . written with the humility of he who confesses himself and with the honesty of he who bore witness.”—Primo Levi
 
“The writing of memoirs is a difficult art that Dan Segre fully possesses. Under his pen, history and psychology merge in one captivating narrative which illuminates the turmoils, fears and triumphs of his generation.”—Elie Wiesel
 
“Beautifully written. . . . [A] labyrinthine, spell-binding autobiography, full of passionate tenderness.”—New York Review of Books
 
“An unusually attractive book—attractive in its irony, its energy and its moral insight. Mr. Segre had some rich material to work with, and he has done it justice.”—New York Times 
 

 
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The Narrow Bridge
Beyond the Holocaust
Isaac Neuman, with Michael Palencia-Roth
University of Illinois Press, 2000

As a boy studying Torah, Isaac Neuman learned to seek the spiritual lessons hidden in everyday life. Likewise, in this narrative of occupation and holocaust, he uncovers a core of human decency and spiritual strength that inhumanity, starvation, and even death failed to extinguish.

Unlike many Holocaust memoirs that focus on physical suffering and endurance, The Narrow Bridge follows a spiritual journey. Neuman describes the world of Polish Jewry before and during the Holocaust, recreating the strong religious and secular personalities of his childhood and early youth in Zdunska Wola, Poland: the outcast butcher, Haskel Traskalawski; the savvy criminal-turned-entrepreneur Nochem Ellia; the trusted Dr. Lemberg, liaison to the German occupation government; and Neuman's beloved teacher, Reb Mendel. Through their stories, Neuman reveals the workings of a community tested to the limits of faith and human dignity.

With his brother Yossel, Neuman was transported to the Poznan area, first to the Yunikowo work camp in May 1941, then on to St. Martin's Cemetery camp, where they removed gold jewelry and fillings from exhumed corpses. A string of concentration camps followed, each more oppressive than the last: Fürstenfelde, Auschwitz, Fünfteichen, Gross Rosen, Mauthausen, Wels, and Ebensee. In the midst of these horrors, the brothers kept their feet on the "narrow bridge" of life by holding to their faith, their memories, and each other. In the end, only Isaac survived.

The Narrow Bridge celebrates symbolic victories of faith over brute force. The execution of Zdunska Wola's Jewish spiritual and intellectual leaders is trumped by an act of breathtaking courage and conviction. A secret Passover Seder is cobbled together from hoarded bits of wax, piecemeal prayers, and matzoh baked in delousing ovens. A dying fellow inmate gives Neuman his warm coat as they both lie freezing on the ground.

Such rituals of faith and acts of kindness, combined with boyhood memories and a sense of spiritual responsibility, sustained Neuman through the Holocaust and helped him to reconstruct his life after the war. His story is a powerful testimony to an unquenchable faith and a spirit tried by fire.

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Novel and Film
Essays in Two Genres
Bruce Morrissette
University of Chicago Press, 1985
"Since the late 1950s," writes James R. Lawler in his Foreword to this volume, "Morrissette has stood as one of the most incisive explicators of the nouveau roman, of its past and present affiliations, of its interaction with the cinema."

The influential essays collected in Novel and Film display a wide range of critical and analytic approaches to the narrative aspects of the two genres. For all the variety of their subjects, from constructional forms such as interior duplication and game play to intertextual parallels with mathematics and topology, these essays together define a unified critical perspective, one that has brought fresh precision to the analysis of narrative techniques and that continues to raise questions of prime importance to contemporary fiction. Included is a complete bibliography of Morrissette's scholarly works.
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A Photographer of Note
Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice
Geleve Grice
University of Arkansas Press, 2003

In a selection of more than one hundred black and white images taken over a period of sixty years, this book bears witness to the life of a remarkable photographer and to small-town African American life in the middle of the twentieth century. Geleve Grice was born and raised near Pine Bluff, and he has documented the ordinary life of his community: parades, graduations, weddings, club events, and whatever else brought people together. In the process he has created a remarkable historical portrait of an African American community. Through his lens we glimpse the daily patterns of segregated Pine Bluff, and we also participate in the excitement of greeting extraordinary visitors. Martin Luther King Jr., Mary McLeod Bethune, Harry S. Truman, and others all came through town.

Folklorist Robert Cochran worked with Grice to select these photographs from the thousands he has taken across a lifetime. They organized the work chronologically, reflecting Grice’s early years in small-town Arkansas, his travel as a serviceman in World War II, and his long career in Pine Bluff. Cochran’s accompanying chapters link Grice to the great tradition of American community photographers. He also shows how work for pay-at the Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College in Pine Bluff; at the Arkansas State Press daily newspaper; through his own studio-shaped Grice’s work. Cochran shows that Grice not only made his living taking photographs for jobs, but that he also made his own life by making photographs for himself-and now for history.

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Populism in Twentieth Century Mexico
The Presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría
Edited by Amelia M. Kiddle and María L. Muñoz; Foreword by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Mexican presidents Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) and Luis Echeverría (1970–1976) used populist politics in an effort to obtain broad-based popular support for their presidential goals. In spite of differences in administrative plans, both aimed to close political divisions within society, extend government programs to those on the margins of national life, and prevent foreign ideologies and practices from disrupting domestic politics. As different as they were in political style, both relied on appealing to the public through mass media, clothing styles, and music.

This volume brings together twelve original essays that explore the concept of populism in twentieth century Mexico. Contributors analyze the presidencies of two of the century’s most clearly populist figures, evaluating them against each other and in light of other Latin American and Mexican populist leaders. In order to examine both positive and negative effects of populist political styles, contributors also show how groups as diverse as wild yam pickers in 1970s Oaxaca and intellectuals in 1930s Mexico City had access to and affected government projects.

The chapters on the Echeverría presidency are written by contributors at the forefront of emerging scholarship on this topic and demonstrate new approaches to this critical period in Mexican history. Through comparisons to Echeverría, contributors also shed new light on the Cárdenas presidency, suggesting fresh areas of investigation into the work of Mexico’s quintessentially populist leader. Ranging in approach from environmental history to labor history, the essays in this volume present a complex picture of twentieth century populism in Mexico.
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Shadows of Treblinka
Miriam Kuperhand and Saul Kuperhand
University of Illinois Press, 1998
      Unique and compelling, this husband-and-wife memoir of the Holocaust
        will move and inform generations. As we lose eyewitnesses to this ultimate
        horror, the Kuperhands present us with an elegantly restrained, yet hard-hitting,
        Kaddish to Polish Jewry.
      Miriam was the daughter of a prosperous furrier; Saul was the son of
        a poor shoemaker. Miriam was sixteen when she and her brother roamed the
        wild countryside of Poland, searching for food and shelter--and for their
        parents. Saul was only a few years older when he watched the smoke rising
        from the crematoria and knew that his parents, sister, and eight brothers
        were gone forever. Miriam lived by hiding; Saul lived by escaping from
        the camp.
      The authors emphasize the essential role that Polish Christians played
        in their survival and stress that wit, courage, faith, luck, and even
        a strong will to live were worthless without their help.
      The travail of their survival is wrenching yet comforting, tragic yet
        upbeat, cinematic yet intimate. Shadows of Treblinka will haunt
        and inspire its readers.
 
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The Slow Failure
Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973
Mary E. Daly
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    Today Ireland’s population is rising, immigration outpaces emigration, most families have two or at most three children, and full-time farmers are in steady decline. But the opposite was true for more than a century, from the great famine of the 1840s until the 1960s. Between 1922 and 1966—most of the first fifty years after independence—the population of Ireland was falling, in the 1950s as rapidly as in the 1880s. Mary Daly’s The Slow Failure examines not just the reasons for the decline, but the responses to it by politicians, academics, journalists, churchmen, and others who publicly agonized over their nation’s “slow failure.” Eager to reverse population decline but fearful that economic development would undermine Irish national identity, they fashioned statistical evidence to support ultimately fruitless policies to encourage large, rural farm families. Focusing on both Irish government and society, Daly places Ireland’s population history in the mainstream history of independent Ireland.
    Daly’s research reveals how pastoral visions of an ideal Ireland made it virtually impossible to reverse the fall in population. Promoting large families, for example, contributed to late marriages, actually slowing population growth further. The crucial issue of emigration failed to attract serious government attention except during World War II; successive Irish governments refused to provide welfare services for emigrants, leaving that role to the Catholic Church. Daly takes these and other elements of an often-sad story, weaving them into essential reading for understanding modern Irish history

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Smoky, the Dog That Saved My Life
The Bill Wynne Story
Nancy Roe Pimm
Ohio University Press, 2019

World War II soldier Bill Wynne met Smoky while serving in New Guinea, where the dog, who was smaller than Wynne’s army boot, was found trying to scratch her way out of a foxhole. After he adopted her, she served as the squadron mascot and is credited as being the first therapy dog for the emotional support she provided the soldiers. When they weren’t fighting, Bill taught Smoky hundreds of tricks to entertain the troops. Smoky became a war hero herself at an airstrip in Luzon, the Philippines, where she helped save forty airplanes and hundreds of soldiers from imminent attack.

After the war, Bill worked as a Hollywood animal trainer and then returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. He and Smoky continued to perform their act, even getting their own TV show, How to Train Your Dog with Bill Wynne and Smoky.

Nancy Roe Pimm presents Bill and Smoky’s story to middle-grade readers in delightful prose coupled with rich archival illustrations. Children will love learning about World War II from an unusual perspective, witnessing the power of the bond between a soldier and his dog, and seeing how that bond continued through the exciting years following the war.

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Starting from Loomis and Other Stories
Hiroshi Kashiwagi
University Press of Colorado, 2013
A memoir in short stories, Starting from Loomis chronicles the life of accomplished writer, playwright, poet, and actor Hiroshi Kashiwagi. In this dynamic portrait of an aging writer trying to remember himself as a younger man, Kashiwagi recalls and reflects upon the moments, people, forces, mysteries, and choices—the things in his life that he cannot forget—that have made him who he is.

Central to this collection are Kashiwagi’s confinement at Tule Lake during World War II, his choice to answer “no” and “no” to questions 27 and 28 on the official government loyalty questionnaire, and the resulting lifelong stigma of being labeled a “No-No Boy” after his years of incarceration. His nonlinear, multifaceted writing not only reflects the fragmentations of memory induced by traumas of racism, forced removal, and imprisonment but also can be read as a bold personal response to the impossible conditions he and other Nisei faced throughout their lifetimes.

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To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back
Memories of an East LA Outlaw
By Ernie López and Rafael Pérez-Torres
University of Texas Press, 2005

When Ernie López was a boy selling newspapers in Depression-era Los Angeles, his father beat him when he failed to bring home the expected eighty to ninety cents a day. When the beatings became unbearable, he took to petty stealing to make up the difference. As his thefts succeeded, Ernie's sense of necessity got tangled up with ambition and adventure. At thirteen, a joyride in a stolen car led to a sentence in California's harshest juvenile reformatory. The system's failure to show any mercy soon propelled López into a cycle of crime and incarceration that resulted in his spending decades in some of America's most notorious prisons, including four and a half years on death row for a murder López insists he did not commit.

To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back is the personal life story of a man who refused to be broken by either an abusive father or an equally abusive criminal justice system. While López freely admits that "I've been no angel," his insider's account of daily life in Alcatraz and San Quentin graphically reveals the violence, arbitrary infliction of excessive punishment, and unending monotony that give rise to gang cultures within the prisons and practically insure that parolees will commit far worse crimes when they return to the streets. Rafael Pérez-Torres discusses how Ernie López's experiences typify the harsher treatment that ethnic and minority suspects often receive in the American criminal justice system, as well as how they reveal the indomitable resilience of Chicanos/as and their culture. As Pérez-Torres concludes, "López's story presents us with the voice of one who—though subjected to a system meant to destroy his soul—not only endured but survived, and in surviving prevailed."

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William & Rosalie
A Holocaust Testimony
William Schiff
University of North Texas Press, 2007

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Wings of Gold
An Account of Naval Aviation Training in World War II, The Correspondence of Aviation Cadet/Ensign Robert R. Rea
Wesley Phillips Newton
University of Alabama Press, 1987
Wings of Gold makes a unique contribution to the history of naval aviation. The book sets out the day-to-day experiences and reactions of a cadet who went through the aviation training program at its peak during World War II. An emphasis on training is missing in almost all books dealing with that conflict; in this book, it is the focus. In contrast with official histories, this is an account of how training did occur, rather than how it was intended to occur. It chronicles failures as well as successes, frustrations and achievements. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction to the history of naval aviation training, the authors recount the personal experiences of an individual cadet preparing for war, based on wartime letters written by cadet Rea to his family. The letters are open and candid, and they provide an insider’s look at the conditions and nature of the Naval Aviation Training Program in the 1940s.
 
Millions of Americans underwent military training during World War II, and contemporary historians and readers have begun to recognize the significance and value of primary sources related not only to combat but also to training and preparedness.
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The Worlds of Herman Kahn
The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi
Harvard University Press, 2005

Herman Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a living as a standup comedian. Indeed, galumphing around stages across the country, joking his way through one grotesque thermonuclear scenario after another, he came frighteningly close. In telling the story of Herman Kahn, whose 1960 book On Thermonuclear War catapulted him into celebrity, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi captures an era that is still very much with us--a time whose innocence, gruesome nuclear humor, and outrageous but deadly serious visions of annihilation have their echoes in the "known unknowns and unknown unknowns" that guide policymakers in our own embattled world.

Portraying a life that combined aspects of Lenny Bruce, Hitchcock, and Kubrick, Ghamari-Tabrizi presents not one Herman Kahn, but many--one who spoke the suffocatingly dry argot of the nuclear experts, another whose buffoonery conveyed the ingenious absurdity of it all, and countless others who capered before the public, ambiguous, baffling, always open to interpretation. This, then, is a story of one thoroughly strange and captivating man as well as a cultural history of our moment. In Herman Kahn's world is a critical lesson about how Cold War analysts learned to fill in the ciphers of strategic uncertainty, and thus how we as a nation learned to live with the peculiarly inventive quality of strategy, in which uncertainty generates extravagant threat scenarios.

Revealing the metaphysical behind the dryly deliberate, apparently practical discussion of nuclear strategy, this book depicts the creation of a world where clever men fashion Something out of Nothing--and establishes Herman Kahn as our first virtuoso of the unknown unknowns.

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