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Displacement
is the theme for February and March 2006
in conjunction with River Falls Reads
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The Dust Bowl
The
dirty thirties: tales of the nineteen thirties during which occurred a great drought, a lengthy depression and the era commonly called the dust bowl years
by William H. Hull
The author shares the experiences of 147 people who
lived through the terrible years of the Great Depression. People
from 21 different states tell 151 different stories - all young people
at the time, telling how they manages to exist.
Acts of God : the unnatural history of natural disaster in America
by Theodore Steinberg
"In Acts of God, environmental historian Ted Steinberg explains that much of the death and destruction has been well within the realm of human control. Steinberg exposes the fallacy of seeing such calamities as simply random events.
Seeing nature or God as the primary culprit, Steinberg argues, has helped to hide the fact that some Americans are better protected from the violence of nature than their counterparts lower down the socioeconomic ladder."
The worst hard time : the untold story of those who survived the great American dust bowl
by Timothy Egan
Presents an oral history of the dust storms that devastated the Great Plains during the Depression, following several families and their communities in their struggle to persevere despite the devastation.
Japanese Internment
Snow falling on cedars
David Guterson
San Piedro Island in Puget Sound is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than one man's guilt. San Piedro is haunted by memories: memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and a Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost; and, above all, the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.
Forbidden diary : a record of wartime internment, 1941-1945
Natalie Crouter
In December of 1941, an American woman living in the Philippines,
becomes a prisoner of the the Japanese, along with her husband and two
children. She keeps a diary written in microscopic script on
scraps of paper. To keep such a record would have been
punishable by death. The diary is not a narrative of terror and
atrocity, but of courage, grace and ingenuity in the face of extreme
hardship.
Out of the frying pan: reflections of a Japanese
American
Bill Hosokawa
"Bill Hosokawa, this country's leading journalist of Japanese descent, tells how he, his wife, and their infant child were herded into a U.S. World War II relocation camp in Wyoming.
Despite his temporary imprisonment, Hosokawa managed to begin publishing his popular "From the Frying Pan" column
in the Pacific Citizen in the early days of World War II, a column he wrote without interruption for over fifty years. In Out of the Frying Pan, Hosokawa offers his insights on the gradual reassimilation of the Japanese American community into the mainstream of American life after the bitterness of interment. Bringing his narrative into the present, he examines with humor and insight the current place occupied by Japanese Americans in the larger culture of our nation."
Native American Relocation
Trail Of Tears : the story of the Cherokee removal
by Dan Elish
In the winter of 1838 the Cherokee nation was moved from its land in Georgia to Oklahoma. Due to the deplorable conditions of the Cherokees during this trip, many of them died. The reasons for this removal were many, but throughout the book the foremost reason presented is that the whites wanted the land and did not share the Cherokee belief that land was community property.
Elish begins by writing about the history and culture of the Cherokee civilization, and then moves into their first contacts with whites. The author then follows with the build up and reasons for the removal of the Cherokees from their homeland.
The long bitter
trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians
by Hill and Wang
"This account of Congress's Indian Removal Act of 1830 focuses on the plight of the Indians of the Southeast--Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles--who were forced to leave their ancestral lands and relocate to what is now the state of Oklahoma. Revealing Andrew Jackson's central role in the government's policies, Wallace examines the racist attitudes toward Native Americans that led to their removal and, ultimately, their tragic fate."
In a Barren Land: American Indian dispossession and
survival
by Paula M. Marks
The author illustrates how, across the nation and over
the course of four centuries, America's original inhabitants were
stripped of both their land and their way of life by a series of
broken promises and bloody persecutions.
International Refugees
Kite Runner
by Khaled Hossein
Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, a story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds: Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of a servant, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him.
Not Without My Daughter
Betty Mahmoody
The true story of one women's courage to escape with her daughter from captivity from Iran where her husband and his family kepther a virtual prisoner.
Pretty Birds
Scott Simon
In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her high school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to do a decent imitation of a ball hitting a hoop. When the violence and terror of "ethnic cleansing" against Muslims begins, Irena and her family, brutalized by Serb soldiers, flee for safety across the river that divides the city." In a city starved for work, a former assistant principal offers Irena a vague job, "duties as assigned." She begins by sweeping floors, but soon, under the tutelage of a cast of rogues and heroes, she becomes a sniper - learning to bide her time, to never return to the same perch, to identify the "mist" around the target that marks a successful shot. Ultimately, Irena's new vocation will lead to complex and cataclysmic consequences for herself and those she loves.
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