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Fifth Chinese Daughter

By Jade Snow Wong. Introduction by Leslie Bow. Illustrated by Kathryn Uhl

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography portrays her coming-of-age in San Francisco's Chinatown, offering a rich depiction of her immigrant family and her strict upbringing, as well as her rebellion against family and societal expectations for a...

Quiet Odyssey

A Pioneer Korean Woman in America

By Mary Paik Lee. Edited with an Introduction by Sucheng Chan. Foreword by David K. Yoo

Mary Paik Lee left her native country in 1905, traveling with her parents as a political refugee after Japan imposed control over Korea. Her father worked in the sugar plantations of Hawaii briefly before taking...

China Gothic

The Bishop of Beijing and His Cathedral

By Anthony E. Clark. Foreword by Leland M. Roth

As China struggled to redefine itself at the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism, religion, and material culture intertwined in revealing ways. This phenomenon is evident in the twin biographies of North China’s leading Catholic...

Chinese Funerary Biographies

An Anthology of Remembered Lives

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Ping Yao, Cong Ellen Zhang

Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased’s biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors’...

The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnúwit Átawish Nch'inch'imamí

Reflections on Sahaptin Ways

By Virginia R. Beavert and Janne L. Underriner

The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnuwit Atawish Nch’inch’imamí is a treasure trove of material for those interested in Native American culture. Author Virginia Beavert grew up in a traditional, Indian-speaking household. Both her parents and...

The Propeller under the Bed

A Personal History of Homebuilt Aircraft

By Eileen A. Bjorkman

On July 25, 2010, Arnold Ebneter flew across the country in a plane he designed and built himself, setting an aviation world record for aircraft of its class. He was eighty-two at the time and...

Looking for Betty MacDonald

The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

By Paula Becker

Betty Bard MacDonald (1907–1958), the best-selling author of The Egg and I and the classic Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children’s books, burst onto the literary scene shortly after the end of World War II. Readers embraced her...

Bootstraps Need Boots

One Tory’s Lonely Fight to End Poverty in Canada

By Hugh Segal

For more than four decades, Hugh Segal has been one of the leading voices of progressive conservatism in Canada. A self‑described Red Tory warrior who disdained “boot strap” approaches to poverty, he has always promoted...

A World without Martha

A Memoir of Sisters, Disability, and Difference

By Victoria Freeman

Victoria Freeman was only four when her parents followed medical advice and sent her sister away to a distant, overcrowded institution. Martha was not yet two, but in the 1960s there was little community acceptance...

The Deepest Roots

Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island

By Kathleen Alcalá

As friends began “going back to the land” at the same time that a health issue emerged, Kathleen Alcalá set out to reexamine her relationship with food at the most local level. Remembering her parents,...

The Tao of Raven

An Alaska Native Memoir

By Ernestine Hayes

In her first book, Blonde Indian, Ernestine Hayes powerfully recounted the story of returning to Juneau and to her Tlingit home after many years of wandering. The Tao of Raven takes up the next and,...

The Way Home

By David Neel

David Neel was an infant when his father, a Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw artist, died, triggering events that would separate him from the traditions of his homeland. When the aspiring photographer saw a mask carved by an ancestor...

Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet

Eating with the World in Mind

By Nico Slate

John Okada

The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy

By Frank Abe, Greg Robinson, Floyd Cheung

No-No Boy, John Okada’s only published novel, centers on a Japanese American who refuses to fight for the country that incarcerated him and his people in World War II and, upon release from federal prison...

Firebrand Feminism

The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore

By Breanne Fahs

Unapologetic, troublemaking, agitating, revolutionary, and hot-headed: radical feminism bravely transformed the history of politics, love, sexuality, and science. In Firebrand Feminism, Breanne Fahs brings together ten years of dialogue with four founders of the radical...

Enduring Conviction

Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice

By Lorraine K. Bannai

Fred Korematsu’s decision to resist F.D.R.’s Executive Order 9066, which provided authority for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, was initially the case of a young man following his heart: he wanted...

Warnings against Myself

Meditations on a Life in Climbing

By David Stevenson

From his youthful second ascent of the north ridge of Mount Kennedy in the Yukon’s Saint Elias Range, an in-and-out on skis for which he had not entirely learned how to ski, to a recent...

Unpleasantries

Considerations of Difficult Questions

By Frank Soos

Even from upside-down in his recently flipped truck, Frank Soos reveals himself to be ruminative, grappling with the limitations of language to express the human condition. Moving quickly—skiing in the dark or taking long summer...

A Family History of Illness

Memory as Medicine

By Brett L. Walker

While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on...

Uplake

Restless Essays of Coming and Going

By Ana Maria Spagna

For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You’re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she...