Web Log
Mar 6, 02:28 AM | Author: jane kim | Category: personal
what i'm reading....
I have been finding less and less time to read and listen to music in the last two years. Here are a few books that I have been enjoying. Please comment and recommend some good reads for me too!
On the Bedstand
1) Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation by Jeff Chang – This book is about music and politics. How could I not love it? Very well written, Jeff articulates complicated subject matter in a compelling and understandable manner. He includes incredible primary sources, interviews, policies and urban planning that led to the brewing of hip hop that we all know today. Incredible. The book won lots of awards too that I won’t regurgitate.
2) Towards Land, Work and Power by Jaron Browne, Marisa Franco, Jason Negron-Gonzalez and Steve Williams – Written by the organizers of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) in San Francisco, this book breaks down the urban planning and political history of communities of color in San Francisco and then sets this within the context of the larger history of global imperialism and capitalism. As an organizer myself, it is interesting food for thought. I realize that I don’t always have time to think about my work locally within the context of what is going on globally. The book teases the reader with promised answers to the question “What will it take to build a movement in … [a] despondent and challenging time?” The book did a great job with a basic history of SF communities of colors, however, it left me wanting answers.
On the Waiting List
1) Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delise – A graphic novel of cartoonist Delise’s journey into North Korea after being granted a work visa via a French animation company. I am always a little skeptical of a foreigner’s observations of Asia, but my love for graphic novels and interest in the half of the Korean nation that has been cut off from the rest of the world brought this book to my bedstand.
2) Letters from Mississippi edited by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez – Recommended by Kimshree Maufas, I have started this book and am excited to read letters of black and white volunteers/organizers who were a part of one of the greatest US student movement groups, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee).
There’s actually a lot more. In particular, nonfiction books that come from academia, including stuff from Ethnic Studies. But man, I start reading those books and I don’t understand them! I thought Ethnic Studies was supposed to challenge academia and perform and write research that benefit our communities. Well that’s hard to do if WE can’t understand them. I feel like a lot of Ethnic Studies professors are in a race to sound more post modern (aka POMO) than everyone else so that they can seem academic and be more accepted by academia. That wasn’t why we fought for it! We wanted to challenge academia and its mission! Don’t conform.
Good Books from the Recent Past
1) Barefoot Gen Volumes 1-4 by Keiji Nakazawa- I am hooked on graphic novels! Derek Kirk Kim’s incredible book Same Difference got me and I’ve been addicted ever since. (Oh, I’m not the only person who loved it. Derek won the 2004 Eisner Award, the “Oscars” for comics, for this book.) What a powerful medium to tell stories… with frozen images for the reader to really soak in along with words! Sometimes pictures and human expression are all you need.
I asked Derek for more and he recommended the series that inspired him, Barefoot Gen. And wow… this series is incredible. Written in the seventies, it is an autobiography of Nakazawa, who was seven when the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on his town, Hiroshima. This book will make you hate the American government more. And all governments that uselessly engage in war to the detriment of their citizens, like the Japanese government at that time. The story follows 6 year-old Gen’s journey prior to and after the bombing. It’s now the gift that everyone gets from me.
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Sometime around 914 days ago, Hasan said:
Have you read Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins? That’s what I’m reading right now. If you’d like, I can lend it to you.