Showing results by narrator "David Shih" in All Categories

American discussions of the Vietnam War tend to gloss over the period from 1972 to the final North Vietnamese offensive in 1975. But these were brutal times for America's South Vietnamese allies combined with a period of intense diplomatic negotiations conducted under the increasing reality that America had abandoned them.

Dr. David Dao was dragged off United Express Flight 3411 on April 9, 2017 after refusing to give up his seat. In the tradition of contemporary immigrant stories comes a personal narrative of the many small but significant acts of racial discrimination faced on the way to the American dream.

One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade's worth of cult-reputation essays - it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.

Li Du was prepared to travel anywhere except for one place: home. But to solve the mystery that surrounds his mentor’s execution, that’s where he must go. He is beginning to make progress with his task when his search for answers buried in the past is interrupted by murder in the present....

Equality is easy to grasp in theory but often hard to achieve in reality. In this accessible and wide-ranging work, American University law professor Robert L. Tsai offers a stirring account of how legal ideas that aren't necessarily about equality at all - ensuring fair play, behaving reasonably, avoiding cruelty, and protecting free speech - have often been used to overcome resistance to justice and remain vital today.

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is not only a tale of injustice; it is a moving story of faith. In this pathbreaking account, Duncan Ryuken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation's history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American.

The national security and civil liberties tensions of the World War II mass incarceration link 9/11 and the 2015 Paris-San Bernardino attacks to the Trump era in America - an era darkened by accelerating discrimination against and intimidation of those asserting rights of freedom of religion, association and speech, and an era marked by increasingly volatile protests. This book discusses the broad civil liberties challenges posed by these past-into-the-future linkages.

You know what you don't believe: about the Bible, the church, and God. You don't agree with the doctrines of an exclusionary, dominant Christianity. But what if someone asked you: "What do you believe?" In this primer on progressive, expansive, generous Christianity, writer and pastor Bruce Reyes-Chow helps us reconsider—or consider for the first time—what it means to choose faith.

In public life and in Shih's own, "Asian Americanness" has changed shape constantly, directed by the needs of the country's racial imaginary. A memoir in essays, Chinese Prodigal examines the emergence of "Asian American" identity in a post-Civil Rights America in the wake of Vincent Chin's death. Shih guides us through the roles offered to Asian Americans to play, illuminating what these issues have to teach us about American values and about the vexed place Asians and Asian Americans inhabit today. Shih masterfully captures the intimate costs of becoming an American.

A probing work of narrative history that reveals the hidden story of immigrant detention in the United States, deepening urgent national conversations around migration.