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Mitsuko “Mitzi” Asai was not yet ten years old in the spring of 1942 when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—about two-thirds of them US citizens—from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps. They included Mitzi and most of her family, who owned a fruit orchard in Hood River, Oregon. The Asais spent much of World War II in the camps while two of the older sons served in the Pacific in the US Army. Three years later, when the camps began to close, the family returned to Hood River to find an altered community. Shop owners refused to serve neighbors they had known for decades; racism and hostility were open and largely unchecked. Humiliation and shame drove teenaged Mitzi to reject her Japanese heritage, including her birth name. More than a decade later, her life took another turn when a Fulbright grant sent her to teach in Japan, where she reconnected with her roots.

In From Thorns to Blossoms, Mitzi recounts her rich and varied life, from a childhood surrounded by barbed wire and hatred to a successful career as a high school English teacher and college instructor in English as a Second Language. Today, Asai descendants continue to tend the Hood River farm while the town confronts its shameful history. Originally published in 1990 as Made in Japan and Settled in Oregon, this revised and expanded edition describes the positive influence Mitzi’s immigrant parents had on their children, provides additional context for her story, and illuminates the personal side of a dark chapter in US history. It’s the remarkable story of a transformation from thorns into blossoms, pain into healing.

“Another fine, reflective, anecdotal look at rural Texas.” —New Yorker

“Graves writes eloquently about a countryman’s concerns. There's not a false note in the book.” —Boston Globe

“Like the unmortared stone fences of Graves’s native hill country, From a Limestone Ledge is constructed of bits and pieces never designed to fit together, yet made to achieve a unity that is more enduring than the sum of its individual parts by the hands of a master craftsman.” —Southwestern Historical Quarterly

“The beauty of his work endures, and there is a greater pride in Texans’ hearts for their home, I think, than there would be if he hadn’t written the books he did.” —Rick Bass, Garden & Gun

“In describing the particulars of his surroundings, Graves often was describing the world in microcosm and the place and plight of humankind in it.” —Bryan Woolley, Dallas Morning News

From the Mines to the Streets draws on the life of Félix Muruchi to depict the greater forces at play in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America during the last half of the twentieth century. It traces Félix from his birth in an indigenous family in 1946, just after the abolition of bonded labor, through the next sixty years of Bolivia's turbulent history. As a teenager, Félix followed his father into the tin mines before serving a compulsory year in the military, during which he witnessed the 1964 coup d'état that plunged the country into eighteen years of military rule. He returned to work in the mines, where he quickly rose to become a union leader. The reward for his activism was imprisonment, torture, and exile. After he came home, he participated actively in the struggles against neoliberal governments, which led in 2006—the year of his sixtieth birthday—to the inauguration of Evo Morales as Bolivia's first indigenous president.

The authors weave Muruchi's compelling recollections with contextual commentary that elucidates Bolivian history. The combination of an unforgettable life story and in-depth text boxes makes this a gripping, effective account, destined to become a classic sourcebook.

While many scholarly works explore the lives and careers of the United States’ senior WWII commanders—Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and MacArthur in particular—the stories of the brigadier and major generals who led at the division and corps level have not received the same degree of focus. Jed Wyman gives these general officers their due by telling the story of his grandfather, General Willard G. Wyman in From the Uyu River to Omaha Beach and Beyond: The Life of General Willard G. Wyman. Although General Wyman is best known for his decisive action on Omaha Beach as assistant division commander of the First Infantry Division, for which he won the Distinguished Service Cross, his career both before and after D-Day is as varied and fascinating as those of his more familiar colleagues.

Wyman’s WWII story is exceptional in its range both geographical—he was one of only a handful of general officers to serve in both the Asian/Pacific and European Theaters—and in rank, as he rose from colonel to major general and division commander over the course of the war. The array of important individuals he encountered and worked with during this demanding time is equally exceptional, including such military luminaries as Joseph Stilwell, Omar Bradley, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower. There were political encounters as well, the most significant with Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in Burma, and encounters with prominent journalists and entertainers. None of these people meant as much, however, to Wyman as the GIs under his command, for whom he worked tirelessly to ensure a safe and free return to a normal life. 

While many questions about Wyman remain unanswered, the author brings him to life as a reliable, efficient combat commander unhindered by the extreme caution associated with General Lucas at Anzio, free from the impetuous nature exhibited by General Patton with the Brolo landing and Hammelburg raid, and lacking in the vainglorious publicity-seeking of some other prominent generals. More broadly, From the Uyu River to Omaha Beach and Beyond conveys the energy, stamina, presence of mind, critical thinking skills, and rapid decision-making of a number of the United States’ lesser-known brigadier and major generals.

When her octogenarian poet mother was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, Mary Cappello and her wife moved into the living room of Rosemary’s one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia to help fulfill her wish to live out her life at home. A memoir in the form of lyric essays—with her mother’s own writing interspersed—Frost Will Come is a daughter’s tribute to her mother’s months-long transition from a deeply lived life to a difficult, beautiful, and uneasy death.

Cappello renders an immersive and emotionally honest portrait of modern caregiving in a prose style that is the very definition of candor. While paying homage to expert caregivers and medical professionals, Cappello also brings her signature razor-sharp analysis to all the things that fall outside the realm of (medical) knowledge—from platitudes around the time death takes to the defiance of a “peaceful death” as a sign of a moral failing. More than a memoir of grief, Frost Will Come is a rare reckoning with the very fundamentals of existence: how we come into being, how we care, and how we die.

Although this book does not attempt to revive the image of Frost as a benign, white-haired sage, it does present him in a strikingly different light than did Lawrence Thompson’s controversial three-volume biography. William H. Pritchard sees Frost whole, demonstrating the complex interaction between the poet’s life and work. Based not only on the poetry, but on letters, notebooks, recorded interviews, and public appearances as well, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered examines the most interesting and significant aspects of Frost’s life and poetry and offers an attentive, sensitive portrait of an artist whose critical reputation continues to grow.

One woman’s quest for knowledge of her father lost at sea

Mary Lee Coe Fowler was a posthumous child, born after her father, a submarine skipper in the Pacific, was lost at sea in 1943. Her mother quickly remarried into a difficult and troubled relationship, and Mary Lee’s biological father was never mentioned. It was not until her mother died and Mary Lee was a middle-aged adult that she set out to learn not only who her father was, but what happened to him and his crew, and why—and also to confront why she had shied away from asking these questions until it was nearly too late.

Fowler searched through old ships’ logs, letters, and naval communiqués; visited submarine museums, the Naval Academy, and other pertinent sites; interviewed old friends and crew members who knew her dad and mom or served concurrently; and slowly reconstructed the world in which they lived. Beautifully written, Fowler’s memoir reveals what she eventually learned: of the perils and harships of submarine service in wartime, of the tragic irony of how her father’s sub was probably lost, and of the long-term damage experienced by the families of those who do not come home from war.

"The most sensational, perpetual teenager in the world.” —Jim Henson

"To know him was to love him, and we do." —Mark Hamill
 
Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography tells the life story of a gifted performer whose gleeful irreverence, sharp wit and generous spirit inspired millions. Richard Hunt was one of the original main five performers in the Muppet troupe. He brought to life an impressive range of characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock and various Muppet movies, everyone from eager gofer Scooter to elderly heckler Statler, groovy girl Janice to freaked-out lab helper Beaker, even early versions of Miss Piggy and Elmo. Hunt also acted, directed and mentored the next generation of performers. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable in that he crammed them all into only 40 years. 

Richard Hunt was just 18 years old when he joined Jim Henson’s company, where his edgy humor quickly helped launch the Muppets into international stardom. Hunt lived large, savoring life’s delights, amassing a vivid, disparate community of friends. Even when the AIDS epidemic wrought its devastation, claiming the love of Hunt’s life and threatening his own life, he showed an extraordinary sense of resilience, openness and joy. Hunt’s story exemplifies how to follow your passion, foster your talents, adapt to life’s surprises, genuinely connect with everyone from glitzy celebrities to gruff cab drivers – and have a hell of a lot of fun along the way.