The Tipping Country
On Saturday, at the Anita Hill 20 conference, Gloria Steinem observed that our country is getting out of control. And that’s a good thing. “Right now we have turned against two wars; in about 20 minutes we are no longer going to be a majority European American or...
Today on the Open Mind
I will be talking with Cecilia Skidmore on The Open Mind on WGVU Radio today and next Sunday. Her program complements a national PBS series called Women, War and Peace. Listen in to the streaming broadcast online, or download the segment at your convenience. The show...
Asian American Literary Award Finalist
The finalists for this year's Asian American Literary Award in non-fiction this year are: A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb by Amitava Kumar (Duke University Press Books) The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese...
Clemency
Clemency: a disposition to be merciful. Letter (excerpt) from Troy Davis, executed last night in Georgia after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene without comment: "As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know...
Off to LA
There have been, in the last weeks, so many things to do: speeches to write, visuals to prepare, plane trips that require me to be patted down and my bags unpacked and gone through by hand because my books and my computer cord in my carry-on are so close together in...
September 10th at the Japanese American National Museum
This weekend, to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I will be speaking and reading from Hiroshima in the Morning at the Japanese American National Museum. The program starts at 2 pm. The museum, if you have never been there, is beautiful and...
Fishing, Hawaii Style
We (the boys and I) are in Hawaii visiting my Dad as we usually do a couple of times a year. Yesterday, fishing out of Kona, my oldest caught his first big blue marlin. Not exactly the Old Man and the Sea; the Tropical Sun is a very luxurious boat. This fish...
Dayton Literary Peace Prize
“Are we so naïve as to think that we can bring peace to the world through words? Yes we are. What else do we have?” - Elie Weisel Hiroshima in the Morning has been nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, "the first and only annual U.S. literary award...
A beautiful tribute, and a chance to help
The crisis in Japan is far from over; it may be gone from the headlines, but it is not gone from our hearts. Donald & Era Farnsworth's Sacred Pine depicts a pine tree in Rikuzentakata, Japan, a coastal city almost completely flattened by the tsunami following the...
Sixty-six years ago, more than 60,000 people killed in an instant
A moment of silence for the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. In the words of Harry S. Truman, our President, on August 11, 1945, explaining the use of the two atomic bombs: “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard...