Summary:

Katie Takeshima, the narrator of this coming-of-age novel, moved with her immigrant family from Iowa to Georgia when she was in kindergarten. As her parents work long hours in a poultry processing plant with other exploited non-union immigrant workers, she and her older sister Lynn, and her little brother, Sammy, enjoy a loving and fairly free childhood. Lynn is Katie's primary teacher. Among her most important lessons is to see everything around her as "kira kira"--a Japanese word meaning something like "glittering"--moving and alive. When Lynn sickens and then dies of lymphoma, Katie has to do some fast growing up, and in her mourning develops a sharper sense of the glittering, mysterious presence of spirit and life in a world full of prejudice, poverty, and loss.

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In her senior year of high school, having uncharacteristically drunk too much at a party, Angel Hansen consents to be taken home by a boy she normally doesn’t care much about, and ends up having sex with him. Two months later, with the help of her best friend, Karin, she takes a pregnancy test, finds it is positive, and visits an abortion clinic. Karin, who has had an abortion, is ready to support her in complete secrecy. Tim, the father, is horrified, but consents to pay for the procedure. At the last minute, however, and without being able to explain her reasoning to either of them, Angel decides not to go through with the abortion.

In the ensuing months, she endures her parents’ disappointment, her friends’ distancing, and the loss of a number of hopes, including the Yale education she was expecting. In the course of those months, however, she also finds new levels of relationship evolving with parents, grandparents, and the few friends who decide to engage with her on new terms, including Danny Stanton, a friend she’d grown up with, and had recently come to love in new (but, she thought, hopeless) ways. To her great surprise, Danny asks to accompany her to Lamaze classes, and, after taking her to the prom in her ninth month, sees her through the baby’s birth. The story, told in the first person in the form of journal entries, chronicles a young woman’s process of maturing through the consequences of a mistake into acceptance of responsibility for choices, even one she can’t fully account for.

One interesting scene records a conversation between Angel and Karin where Karin admits that her weeks-long estrangement comes from a feeling that Angel’s choice to keep the baby implies a judgment of her for terminating her own earlier pregnancy. Angel makes it clear that she respects their differences, fosters no judgment, and can’t even fully articulate why she felt strongly about needing to make a different choice, but feels clear and sure about her own.

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This short novel tells the story of a Japanese-American family’s internment during World War II. They are living comfortably in Berkeley, California, when their nightmare begins. Soon after Pearl Harbor the husband/father is arrested by the FBI--taken away in his housecoat and slippers. We learn of this through the narration of the eight-year-old son, his ten-year-old sister, and their mother--who are rounded up several months later and sent to a camp in Utah. The father remains shadowy--a figure of memory, wishful thinking, and censored letters stamped "Detained Alien Enemy Mail." The reason for his arrest is never explained, as if there is no reason to question the man’s loyalty.

After her husband’s arrest, the mother is left to take care of her children and the house. A few months later she must pack up the household belongings, give away the family cat, kill and bury the family dog, tell her daughter to let loose the pet macaw. They are allowed to bring with them--where to they do not know--only what they can carry. They take an endless train ride through the Nevada desert to reach an internment camp in Utah, "a city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plane high up in the desert" (49).

Here they remain until the war ends, some three and a half years later. They learn to live in one room with a single light bulb; to stand on line for everything; to eat in the mess hall; to avoid rattlesnakes, scorpions, and the sun; and to "never say the Emperor’s name out loud" (52). They are unable to avoid the desert dust that covers and gets into everything. The children attend makeshift classes, play cards, are bored, lonely, and confused. The boy misses and has fantasies about his father, the girl reaches adolescence and becomes cynical, the mother is too depressed to eat or read.

At the end of the war, the three are allowed to go home "with train fare and twenty-five dollars in cash" (117). Their house has been vandalized; neighbors, teachers, and classmates either ignore them or are openly hostile. Finally their father is released from detention in New Mexico, a changed man both in appearance and spirit.

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This remarkable collection of short writings, introduced by renowned poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who visited the Sutterwriters (of Sutter Hospital in Sacramento, California) to offer a workshop, provides a broad, compassionate, imaginative window into the life inside and around an urban hospital. Patients, staff, and all interested in healing through writing are invited to come and participate-with an accent on the latter: no one is invited who isn't willing to write.

Chip Spann, the editor, came to Sutter Hospital with a Ph.D. in English, and has the privilege of coordinating this fluid community of writers as part of his work as a staffmember. His conviction, voiced in an engaging introduction, is that literature is a powerful instrument of healing--both the literature we read and the literature we create--and that the experience of literature belongs in community. The individual pieces are accompanied by photographs and short bios of contributors.

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At fourteen, China Cameron is trying hard to be a good mother to her two-year-old daughter, conceived while China and her best friend, Trip, were "fooling around" at his house one day. Trip and China's disabled Uncle--her only parent since the death of her mother and her father's early abandonment-do all they can to help her stay in school and parent well. But the child contracts a respiratory infection and dies, leaving China not only devastated, but responsible for a large funeral bill: she insists on ordering the most beautiful casket in the catalogue and funeral services that turn out to be devastatingly expensive. To pay the bill, against the advice of Trip and her uncle, China begins working at the reception desk of a local "gentlemen's club."

Though the job requires that she wear skimpy and revealing clothing, and subjects her to the unwelcome attentions of inebriated patrons, she squares it with her conscience by hanging onto the belief that she is doing the best she can for her daughter. The terms of her employment, however, become more difficult as she is moved toward "dancing" on stage. When she finally decides to quit, she finds that the club is partly owned by the funeral director, who has a history of involving young women in her situation in debilitating debt.

A subplot follows the misfortunes of China's best friend, Yolanda, a young women in her twenties with several children by different fathers who is trying to realign her life after her youngest children are taken temporarily to foster care. Despite their various difficulties, the characters enter with compassion and imagination into each other's lives, and find ways to help one another. At the end of the story, China finally consents to visit her daughter's grave--something she has strenuously avoided--nd concedes to the necessity of coming to terms in a new way with her loss so as to reorient her life beyond funeral expenses, and go back to school with a reclaimed hope of a different kind of life.

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Cameron, 18, and her sister Allie, 15, have inherited their father’s large nose. Living in Los Angeles, at the epicenter of the entertainment industry, they are familiar with the social currencies of money and beauty. Their mother, a former film actress, auditioning again after years at home, is exceptionally beautiful. Cameron’s “nose job”—the rhinoplastic surgery her parents arranged for her when she entered high school—has changed her life; it is debatable whether altogether for the better. She is now popular and accepted, but also, after a history of rejection and peers’ mockery, fixated on the kinds of beauty that bring social acceptance. Her interest in photography dovetails with this fascination.

At just the time her parents decide to arrange for a similar “nose job” for Allie, who doesn’t want it, and would rather spend the summer at soccer camp, Cameron decides to use her savings, and her new legal freedom as an 18-year-old, to have breast augmentation. Her parents and most of her friends oppose it, her boyfriend most strenuously, who can’t understand why she would take the risks entailed to do something so clearly unnecessary. As the girls learn, their mother has, at the same time, decided to have a face-lift as a return-to-career move.

Both Cameron and her mother go through the surgery—Cameron at the cost of considerable pain in recovery and aware of the long-term risks and costs. Allie, on the other hand, after coming to know an aging actress who was once a beauty, makes an eleventh-hour decision to refuse surgery and with it, the impossible standards of beauty that seem to her to entrap so many like her sister.

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West coast dancer John Henry made his life the subject of his final performance. Choreographer Bromberg and film maker Rosenberg collaborate with Henry in the creation of a work for the theatre based on his desire to leave an autobiographic legacy. Filmed during the last few years of Henry's life with HIV/AIDS, the documentary examines the image of self as one individual prepares to separate from body and personhood, and continues after his death.

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In the fall of 1979, Keith Burton, a free-lance journalist, saw the videotape 0105 in a bioethics seminar at Southern Methodist University (see annotation in this database). The structural centerpiece of this 1974 documentary is the interview of a burn patient, Donald "Dax" Cowart, by psychiatrist Dr. Robert B. White at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Dr. White had been called in to determine the patient’s competency because of his persistent requests to end the painful treatments, to go home, and to die.

Similar to most viewers of Please Let Me Die, Burton was intrigued by the unanswered questions and the uncertain outcome of the case and ultimately contacted Dax Cowart and his mother, Ada Cowart. Burton invited their collaboration on a follow-up videotape to Please Let Me Die, with the intention of providing "a living record of this man’s struggle for release from pain and despair." [see Keith Burton, "A Chronicle: Dax’s Case As It Happened." In Dax’s Case: Essays In Medical Ethics And Human Meaning, ed. Lonnie D. Kliever. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press) 1989: 1].

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This powerful book of black and white photographs contains four sections labeled: I. The End of Manual Labor, 1986-, II. Diverse Images 1974-87, III. Famine in the Sahel, 1984-85, and IV. Latin America, 1977-84. In addition, photographs accompany the prose-poetry opening essay, "Salgado, 17 Times," by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and the concluding essay, "The Lyric Documentarian," by former New York Times picture editor Fred Ritchin. This oversize book concludes with a list of captions for the photographs and a detailed two-page biography of Salgado. Essentially the photographs cover Salgado’s impressive work from 1974-89.

Every image is of a person or people. Many are suffering, many are starving, grieving, keening, dying, displaced. Many are children. Many are laboring under impossibly harsh conditions such as the teeming, mud-coated manual laborers of the Brazilian Serra Pelada gold mine. An Ethiopian father anoints the corpse of his famine starved, skin and bone child with oil. An old man, squinting in the sun, leans over to touch the arm of an equally thin and weak man in a Sudanese refugee camp. Rarely, the people are smiling or celebrating.

The photographs are global: Angola, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chad, Cuba, Ecuador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mexico, Portugal, Sudan, Thailand, and more. As Galeano notes, "This much is certain: it would be difficult to look at these figures and remain unaffected. I cannot imagine anyone shrugging his shoulder, turning away unseeing, and sauntering off, whistling." (p. 7) [156 pp.]

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Japanese American artist, Henry Sugimoto, depicted life in the Arkansas internment camps into which he and his entire family (including wife and child) and many others of Japanese descent were forced, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Sugimoto's life and his painting were profoundly influenced by his incarceration experience during World War II. During and after this period his subject changed from landscapes to scenes of camp life and the Japanese emigration/immigration experience; these works often had social and political purpose.

Dominating this picture are five brown-skinned, black-haired babies clad only in diapers, who are sitting or standing on a white sheet. Remarkably, the babies are featureless, although one appears to be crying. Another is standing, waving a tiny American flag. Looming in the lower left of the picture is an MP (military police), also brown-skinned, but with Caucasian features. He stands guard, not facing the children, and prominently holding a rifle to which a bayonet is attached.

Separating the babies from the MP is the barbed wire fence that stretches along the painting's foreground. In the background is the watch tower often depicted in Sugimoto's paintings, more barbed wire fences that enclose the children, and a menacing dark brown sky.

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