Book Beat The City University of New York

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alvin Eng’s long, strange trip began in his family’s laundry in Flushing (presided over by his Cantonese opera-singing “Empress Mother”). From there, somehow, he became  an adolescent punk rocker and then a downtown playwright and storyteller inspired by a delayed embrace of his Chinese heritage. He teaches at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and if his students want to know more than what’s on Rate My Professors, they can read his memoir. It’s just out in paperback.

RELATED LINKS



* More about Alvin Eng

* A bit about his academic life at BMCC

* NYT: How a memoirist and playwright spends his Sundays 

* Alvin on YouTube

    

Her father’s absence when she was growing up made half of Ava Chin’s family history a family mystery. But when she finally met him in Chinatown, in her twenties, it sparked a years-long quest that not only uncovered her own family’s remarkable story but revealed the much deeper history of exclusion that defined the Chinese American experience for a century.  Chin, a professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at the CUNY Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, tells a deeply personal story with the sweep of history in Mott Street: A Chinese Amerian Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming.”

 

 



Crystal Hana Kim says the Korean War is so deeply ingrained in her family’s history–but so remote for Americans today–that it became the driving force for her to become a writer. “I wanted to force it into our cultural consciousness because it’s known as the Forgotten War,” Kim tells Joe Tirella on this episode of CUNY Book Beat. “I went to public school [in New York] and I think the Korean War was one paragraph sandwiched between World War Two and the Vietnam War. And I found that really frustrating as a child because my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, all of my family experienced it.”

The Korean War is the backdrop of Kim’s widely hailed 2018 debut novel, If You Leave Me, in which she digs into her cultural roots to tell the story of a young woman’s life-altering choices as she and her family struggle to survive the war. Now a visiting assistant professor at Queens College, Kim was named to the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 list in 2022, and her second novel, The Stone Home, will be published next year.



* More about Crystal Hana Kim and If You Leave Me



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In her genre-bending memoir Tastes Like War — a finalist for this year’s National Book Award — CUNY professor Grace Cho chronicles her quest to understand her mother’s journey as a Korean War bride who endured the traumas of war, dislocation, racism and, eventually, schizophrenia. Cho, a professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island who earned her doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center, learned how to cook the food her mother remembered from childhood as a way to connect through the fog of time and mental illness. The book, published by CUNY’s Feminist Press, is a melding of personal memoir and  sociological investigation — and “a wrenching,  powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience,” wrote Kirkus Reviews.

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Episode Transcript

Joe Tirella: Last month, Grace Cho’s harrowing new book, Tastes Like War, was named a finalist for the National Book Award in the category of nonfiction.  Cho, a professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, takes readers on a journey through the life and psyche of her mother, a Korean immigrant who began to experience schizophrenia when Cho was a teenager growing up in rural Washington state. Tastes Like War is part personal memoir — the story of Cho’s life as a young Korean-American in a xenophobic small town. It’s partly an examination of how race and gender impact mental health, and the story of Cho’s struggles to help her mother navigate the health care system. But at its heart, Cho’s book is the tale of a daughter’s deep and abiding love for her mother — a spirited and gifted woman who suffered immensely while growing up during the Korean War, only to endure the traumas of dislocation, racism and mental illness after emigrating to America.

Grace Cho, welcome to Book Beat.

Grace Cho:  Thank you so much for having me.

JT:  In your memoir, Tastes Like War, you detailed the prejudice and hostility directed at you growing up biracial in rural Washington State. You’re the daughter of a Korean mom, and an American born dad who was a Merchant Marine. Can you talk about your early childhood as a Korean American at that time?

GC: So it’s interesting because my earliest early childhood memories all take place in the world of my mother. Since my dad was a Merchant Marine he was gone six months out of the year and so I remember being in this world with her that felt very safe. She took us to Korea during summers, so I had some early childhood memories of being with her family with my aunt and my grandmother. And then once I started school, my experience really started to change. So I started school in this small town, a rural town that was very xenophobic. We were the first Koreans to arrive in this town. There were not any other immigrants there at that time that I was aware of. And so very quickly, once I started school, I learned all the ways in which I was “the other” to the people in that town. Constant reminders that I was Asian. I learned racial slurs at that time. I experienced children, you know, pulling the skin of their eyelids to try to make them look Asian, and often felt like, you know, I was sort of the object of their mockery. And it was, you know, like a weekly if not a daily occurrence to experience those types of things. So, you know, even though I was biracial, no one ever let me forget that I was Korean. So my identity definitely developed as Korean American, and I had a really strong Korean American identity prior to starting school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In “Sparring with Smokin’ Joe,” CUNY journalism professor Glenn Lewis recalls the epic rivalry between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali that started with the ‘fight of the century” in New York 50 years ago–a rivalry that transcended sports, became a cultural and racial touchstone and ultimately defined Frazier’s life inside and outside the ring. Lewis draws on the months he spent with Frazier in 1980 when the ex-champ was  contemplating a comeback, rendering a revealing and intimate portrait of an underappreciated champion whose legacy has been consigned to Ali’s shadow.

Lewis is a veteran journalist and author who directs the journalism program at York College and also teaches at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. “Sparring with Smokin’ Joe” — a book Lewis waited 40 years to write — has been named one of the “Top 10 Sports Books of 2021” by the American Library Association’s Booklist.

Follow Glenn on Twitter at @glennlewisnyc and find him on Facebook at glenn.lewis.nyc





Episode Transcript

Rick Firstman:   Welcome, Glenn, to CUNY Book Beat. Joe Frazier was was one of the great fighters of any era but he was and will forever be overshadowed by Muhammad Ali. But at the same time, Ali’s legend probably wouldn’t be what it is if not for his intense rivalry with Frazier. It’s not a coincidence that Ken Burns’s new PBS film on Ali is out, like your book, at the 50th anniversary of the first Ali-Frazier bout at Madison Square Garden — the fight of the century. But this is about more than boxing. It was a rivalry and a relationship that transcended the sport, wasn’t it?

Glenn Lewis:   Definitely. As a matter of fact, it was much more than just a sporting event. I mean, the fight of the century really connoted the atmosphere that was going on around the fight. First of all, it was the first time that two undefeated champions, heavyweight champions, met for the undisputed heavyweight title. You got to remember, Ali was stripped of his title in 1967 when we he was undefeated. And Frazier came into the fight of the century, undefeated and holding all of Ali’s former titles. They were far and away the two best heavyweights in the golden era of the heavyweight. This was a time when there were more great heavyweights than any other time in history. And these were the two best or supposedly the two best. Also, the fight of the century incorporated really a political and cultural confrontation like the sport had never seen before. A lot of people came to boxing because of Ali. Ali was exciting. He was young. He moved, he was constant motion. He was entertaining. He was political. The Fight of the Century represented Ali’s politics and the politics that he assigned to Joe, in a way. You know, he called himself the Black man’s champion. And at the same time, he would refer to Joe as the white man’s champion. Sort of insinuating that Joe was a traitor to his race. Joe was an Uncle Tom, Joe represented the establishment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jimmy Carter, who turns 97 on October 1, is often thought of as a failed one-term president whose best work came as an ex-president. But in his new political biography of Carter, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, CUNY’s Kai Bird argues that Carter was a much more consequential president than he’s given credit for — and in ways that illuminate what made him one of our most unlikely, uncommon and least understood presidents. Bird says that Carter’s election in 1976–and his rejection four years later by an electorate that embraced Ronald Reagan–was a tipping point in American politics that adds context to the four decades that led to our current moment.

Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist and the author of six previous books. Since 2017, he’s been been executive director and a distinguished lecturer at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY’s Graduate Center. (Photo above by Stephen Frietch)



Related Links

More about Kai Bird

New York Times review of The Outlier

Leon Levy Center conversation with Bird, interviewed by Sam Roberts

 

Episode Transcript

Rick Firstman:  Welcome to CUNY Book Beat. I’m Rick Firstman. Jimmy Carter, who turns 97 on October 1, is often thought of as a failed one term president whose best work came as an ex-president. But in his new political biography of Carter, CUNY’s Kai Bird argues that Carter’s presidency was actually highly accomplished, and in ways that illuminate what made him one of our most unlikely, uncommon and least understood presidents. The book is called “The Outlier: the Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter,” and it’s been hailed as a landmark of presidential biography that contributes new context to the four decades that led to our current moment. Kai Bird is an historian and journalist and the author of six previous books, including “American Promethean,” a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written with Martin J. Sherwin, that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Since 2017, Bird has been executive director and a distinguished lecturer at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Here’s our conversation.

Kai Bird, welcome to CUNY Book Beat and it’s a real pleasure to talk with you about your new biography of Jimmy Carter, The Outlier. So let me start by asking you a little bit about how you came to the project. I know it was a long road that started some 30 years ago, but you dropped the idea back then, partly because you felt at the time that you weren’t the right person to write this book. So why was that? And what brought you back to it?

Kai Bird:   In 1990 I went down to Georgia, and thinking that I wanted to explore the notion of doing a biography of Jimmy Carter and his presidency. And I did a magazine article about all the great things he was doing with his ex presidency at that point with the Carter Center. But this is just about 10 years after he left the White House. And I decided it was too early, partly because his presidential papers were still classified. But also, I realized, in my visit to Georgia, that it was really a foreign country. I didn’t understand it and didn’t understand their religion, Southern Baptists, his religion, his religiosity. I didn’t understand race in the South. And because it was a foreign country, I thought I’d have to move there, like a foreign correspondent and dig into the culture a...