On American Soil, by Jack Hamann, has had an eventful shelf life. After the publication of this book, Congress urged the Army Review Board to reassess the military convictions of 28 African American WWII soldiers who were accused of lynching an Italian POW. The board did, and finally came to Seattle to meet with the families of those men just last week. An apology was issued and the men's discharges were changed from dishonorable to honorable.

 

 

New street location (only couriers such as Fed-Ex, UPS):
4333 Brooklyn Ave NE
Seattle, WA 98195-9570

 

Jim Kershner is a writer for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane.

Join Jim Kershner in Seattle and other locations:

Wednesday, August 6 at Auntie's Books, Spokane, WA at 7:30 p.m.

Monday, September 15 at University Book Store, Tacoma at 7 p.m.

Thursday, September 18 at Northwest African American Museum, Seattle at 6 p.m.

Judy Yung and Eddie Fung discuss The Adventures of Eddie Fung in Texas, where Eddie lived before joining WWII and becoming the only Chinese American prisoner of war taken by the Japanese.

Thursday, August 14 at DFW Activity Center, Richardson, TX, at 7 p.m.

Saturday, August 16 at Barnes and Noble, Dallas,  TX at 2 p.m.

 

 

B Street tells the intimate stories of the street of shops, restaurants, bars, and brothels where the workmen who built the Grand Coulee Dam spent their recreational hours and wages. From the beginning, B Street was the place to play and let off steam for the white workingmen who had faced the hard times of the Depression. It was a raucous playground that denied blacks and most dark-skinned Indians access to the frivolity, good times, and pretty ladies that were the main attractions of that provocative place.

This vivid account of a colorful era is based largely on the memories of Lawney Reyes. As a young boy, Lawney wandered B Street with his little sister, Luana, and their dog, Pickles, while their Indian mother and Filipino father eked out a living running a Chinese restaurant. His mother's diaries and the stories told by his parents and older members of the Sin-Aikst tribe contribute to his story.

Lawney L. Reyes is the author of White Grizzly Bear's Legacy: Learning to Be Indian and Bernie Whitebear: An Urban Indian's Quest for Justice.

Lawney will share his B Street memories at:

Wednesday, September 10 at University Book Store at 7 p.m.

Thursday, September 11 at Auntie's Books, Spokane, at 7:30 p.m.

John Witte's poetry sweeps the reader immediately into its crosscurrents, its passionate engagement, and its ambivalence. Composed of staggered tercets, the poems in Second Nature track the chaotic rush and swerve of life as we live it. Wide open to the world, Witte writes with uncommon energy and urgency and his vision is exhilarating.

Second Nature teems with expertly realized lyrics, monologues, and narratives, as well as poems based on historical figures from Ovid to Janis Joplin. The metaphors for human endurance, and the transformative power of art and community, are accurate and rich. Alert to the dangers of love and loss, Witte finds his poems where sorrow and transcendence converge. Like birds singing their "desperate psalm" in a clear-cut, his poems bring us a rare kind of hope.

John Witte's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and, among numerous anthologies, The Norton Introduction to Literature. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches at the University of Oregon and edits Northwest Review. Second Nature is his third book of poetry.

Friday, September 12 at Open Books, at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 13 at Elliott Bay Books, at 2 p.m.

In The Fishermen's Frontier, David Arnold examines the economic, social, cultural, and political context in which salmon have been harvested in southeast Alaska over the past 250 years. The book is about Native and Euro-American fishermen, local fishing communities, industrialists, and resource managers and the ways in which these various groups have imagined, shaped, exploited, and managed the salmon fishery and its resources, arranging it to conform to understandable patterns of social organization and endowing it with cultural meaning.

Join David on Thursday, September 25 at University Book Store at 7 p.m.

 

If there is one film in the canon of Carl Theodor Dreyer that can be said to be, as Jacques Lacan might put it, his most "painfully enjoyable," it is Gertrud. The film's Paris premier in 1964 was covered by the Danish press as a national scandal; it was lambasted on its release for its lugubrious pace, wooden acting, and old-fashioned, stuffy milieu. Only later, when a younger generation of critics came to its defense, did the method in what appeared to be Dreyer's madness begin to become apparent.

As do so many of the heroines of Dreyer's other films, such as La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), Gertrud serves as a locus for Dreyer's twin fixations: written texts, and the heroines who both embody and free themselves from them. Dreyer based Gertrud not only on Hjalmar Soderberg's play of 1906 but also on his own extensive research into the life of the "real" Gertrud, Maria van Platen, whose own words Dreyer interpolated into the film. By using his film as a kind of return to the real woman beneath the text, Dreyer rehearsed another lifelong journey, back to the poor Swedish girl who gave birth to him out of wedlock and who gave him up for adoption to a Danish family, a mother whose existence Dreyer discovered only later in life, long after she had died.

James Schamus is a professor in the School of Arts, Columbia University, and the CEO of Focus Features, the studio behind a number of celebrated films, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Constant Gardener, and Brokeback Mountain. His screenwriting and producing credits include The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and a number of other films from his long collaboration with Ang Lee.

Join James at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Thursday, September 25 at 5:30 p.m.