Minor Feelings: an Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong, 2020, 206 pages, paperback.

The poetry editor of the New Republic discusses her experiences living and working in a culture hostile to expressions of Asian individuality and identity. In this memoir in essays, Hong offers a fierce and timely meditation on race and gender issues from her perspective as a Korean American woman. Candid and unapologetically political, Hong's text deftly explores the explosive emotions surrounding race in ways sure to impact the discourse surrounding Asian identity as well as race and belonging in America.
 

You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War

 by Elizabeth Becker, 2021, 289 pages. Hardback.

 

An incisive history of the Vietnam War via the groundbreaking accomplishments of three remarkable women journalists. In this work, Elizabeth Becker, focuses on the careers of Frances FitzGerald, Kate Webb, and Catherine Leroy, interweaving their stories as they traveled to Vietnam in the mid-1960s. As U.S. involvement was escalating and news organizations continued to send men to chronicle the war, these women paid their own ways and sought out freelance reporting opportunities. "Leroy, FitzGerald, and Webb were the three pioneers who changed how the story of war was told," writes Becker. "They were excluded by nature from the confines of male journalism, with all its presumptions and easy jingoism. They saw the war differently and wrote about it in wholly new ways.”