Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Queer: A Graphic History

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker & Jules Scheele
Activist/academic Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Jules Scheele provide a history of Queer Theory and action in this illustrated guide to this new and controversial area of study. Providing a history of Queerness as it has evolved and is currently thought of, the book introduces the reader to the leading thinkers and theories that will provide a grounding in the meaning of queer Theory and its place in modern thought.

Friday, December 01, 2023

Back to the Garden

Back to the Garden by Laurie R. King
Laurie King creates a new detective, Raquel Laing, to work on a cold case murder that may be related to a string of unsolved murders. Human remains are found under the cement base when the Trustees of the Gardener Estate have a statue with a failing foundation moved. Fifty years ago when the statue was placed at the Estate, it was home to a countercultural commune.
Detective Laing has been working on a series of unsolved murders of young women whose bodies were found under poured cement foundations in the San Francisco area, all linked to a serial killer known as The Highwayman. The alleged killer is dying of cancer and she is trying to get him to help identify the remains of his victims.
With chapters titled THEN and NOW, the author delves into the backstory of the commune, leading up to the day the cement foundation was poured, while she interviews the few members of the group remaining. All the while trying to coax a dying serial killer to identifying his victims.
It is nice to see a new character emerge from the imagination of this gifted writer. Hopefully this book will become the first volume of another succesful detective series for Laurie R. King.

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Riviera Gold by Laurie R. King

Riviera Gold by Laurie R. King
Riviera Gold is the 16th in the Mary Russell series of mystery novels that are based around the growing relationship between the young Mary Russell and a much older Sherlock Holmes after he moves from London to a rural Sussex cottage to take up beekeeping. In this installment set in the summer of 1925, Russell takes advantage of Holmes visit to Romania to go to Monte Carlo looking for Mrs. Hudson. Hudson, who left her employment as Holmes housekeeper and did not leave a forwarding address, has gone to live in Monte Carlo to be close to her old friend Lily Langtree and to live in her favorite city. In this novel we learn a lot about Hudson's backstory before she met Holmes, including a mysterious inheritance from her father that draws Hudson and Russell into contact with Monte Carlo's underworld.
I am very fond of Laurie King's writing style and this book is a worthy addition to this long running series.

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

No-No Boy

No-No Boy by John Okada

No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro, a Japanese-American young man from Seattle, after he is let out of prison at the end of World War II. Before the war started he was in college studying to be an engineer, but when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, he was sent to a series of Japanese internment camps for two years. At that point, he and many other young male Japanese-Americans were asked two questions by the US government: would they swear allegiance to the United States, and would they serve in the US armed forces. Those, like Ichiro, who answered no to both questions were sent to jail for an additional two years and became known as No-No Boys.
This book portrays what it was like for these resisters when they returned home and faced discrimination for their choice. He is surrounded by a Japanese community that is trying to fit back into American life and does not want to dwell on the unjust treatment they received during the war. And yet his No-No status does not allow him to put the past behind him. He needs to come to terms with it. Which is what he does in this book.
Originally published in 1957 No-No Boy was ignored by a country that did not want to come to terms with the injustice of the internment and its effect on the Japanese-American community. Only later in the 1970s did people start to take notice, leading to its republication in 1976. It has been in print ever since and is a seminal work on the Japanese-American internment and its effects on the people of Japanese heritage living on the West Coast. I bought my copy of this book during a visit to Seattle's Wing Luke Museum, which is dedicated to preserving Asian-American art and history.

Saturday, August 19, 2023

Citizen 13660

Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo
After the United States entered World War II all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forcibly relocated to internment camps. Miné Okubo was one of over one hundred thousand people swept up from their homes. She and her brother were first sent to to the Tanforan relocation center, a former racetrack, in San Bruno, California. There they shared a horse stall that smelled of manure and given sacks to fill with hay for their beds. Eventually she was tranferred to the Topaz internment camp in the Sevier Desert of central Utah; it was a dry, windy environment with harsh winters. During the war over 11,000 people were sent there.
A professional artist, she made over 2,000 drawings in charcoal, watercolor, pen, and ink, depicting her everyday experiences in these camps.
In 1946, after the war ended, she published Citizen 13660 (her government assigned number while in the camps) which contains 206 drawings from her internment, each narrated with a short text describing what is depicted in the picture.It covers her life from the years before the war to her final day at the Topaz internment camp, showing the day-to-day lives of her fellow internees of Japanese descent as she lived it. It was the first published account of the experience from an internee and won the American Book Award in 1984. This edition includes a Preface she wrote in 1983.

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist

Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist by Angelica Shirley Carpenter
Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the three most prominent suffragists of the 19th Century, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Early leaders of the movement to get equal rights for women, these three started the seminal work on the movement History of Woman Suffrage. Too Radical for her time, her research on the history of female oppression fueled the Second Wave Feminist Movement. Yet today Matilda Joslyn Gage is the least known of the three. Angelica Shirley Carpenter's biography does a lot to bring Gage's accomplishments to a modern audience. Of the three, Gage was the most radical, tracing women's oppresion to a coordinated effort of organized religion and civil governments. She was also the most scholarly, looking into the hostory of women's oppression. Her writings on this appeared in the first volume of History of Woman Suffrage, and in much greater detail in her later work Woman, Church and State
This book relies a lot on papers preserved by Gage's children who settled in the Dakota Territory in the 1880s. This may explain why the book was published by the South Dakota Historical Society. The title is based on Gage's assertion that, lacking the basic right to vote, women were treated similar to criminals by society.

The Kitchen Madonna

The Kitchen Madonna by Rumer Godden
The Kitchen Madonna is a 1960s children's book about Marta, a middle aged female Ukrainian refugee, who has taken a job as a nanny/housekeeper for a London married cople who are professional architects. They have two children, Gregory (9) and Janet (7), and have had a series of one-year contract foreign nannies that have left Gregory introverted and shy. When Marta arrives seeking a home rather than an address in London, she becomes the secure center that Gregory has been missing. However, when Gregory finds out that Marta is not happy because their new modern home doesn't have a "good place" in the kitchen, a small shrine with an icon, candle, and flower vase, he sets out to find her a Ukrainian icon in busy, modern London. See how it all turns out in The Kitchen Madonna.
Given the current war in Ukraine and the vast number of Ukrainian refugees, this book has a special value today for understanding the good hearted nature of the Ukrainian people and their simple faith and values.

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Book Uncle and Me

Book Uncle and Me by Uma Krishnaswami
Book Uncle and Me is a childrens book about a street corner librarian in India and a young girl who visits him every day to get e new book to read. When Book Uncle gets into trouble she rallies to his defense.
This is a great book for librarians to share with young readers. It shows young people how they are never powerless or too young to speak up against injustice. It also shows how important free access to books is to a community
It has great illustrations by Julianna Swaney.