Author: stephchun

Growing Organic Fruit and Vegetables at Home

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The Small Food Garden
Fresh food straight from the garden—it’s got to be good for you. No matter what size your outdoor space, you can plant, grow, and harvest fresh organic produce using the information in The Small Food Garden: Growing Organic Fruit and Vegetables at Home, by Diana Anthony. Included are vegetables, herbs, and fruit, with tips on planting, growing, and caring for each plant. Investigate the options: look at containers, grow bags, raised beds, and window boxes. Discover what to plant where and how to provide water and nutrients to ensure you grow healthy, productive fruit and vegetables.

September 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3731-0 / $19.99 (PAPER)

Anti-trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong

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The Perfect Business
For those at the high end of the trafficking chain, the sex trade is an alluring and lucrative business: the supply of girls is constant, the costs of operations are low, and interference from law enforcement is weak to non-existent. Anti-trafficking organizations and governments commonly appropriate such market metaphors of supply and demand as they struggle with the moral-political dimensions of a business involving trade, labor, prostitution, migration, and national borders. But how apt are they? Is the sex trade really the perfect business? The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong, by Sverre Molland, is a provocative new book that examines the social worlds and interrelationships of traffickers, victims, and trafficking activists along the Thai-Lao border. It explores local efforts to reconcile international legal concepts, the bureaucratic prescriptions of aid organizations, and global development ideologies with on-the-ground realities of sexual commerce.

Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
September 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3653-5 / $26.00 (PAPER)

Luke Roberts Interview at New Books in East Asian Studies

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Carla Nappi of the New Books in East Asian Studies podcast calls Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan “a gracefully-written study of the performance of authority in Tokugawa politics. It is also one of the most thoughtful historical studies that I’ve had the pleasure to read in a long time.” Listen to her interview with author Luke Roberts here.

In Memoriam — Jerry Bentley (1949–2012)

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Professor, editor, and author Jerry Bentley passed away on July 15 in Honolulu.

Bentley taught early modern European and world history at the University of Hawai‘i. While his early research centered on the religious and political writings of the Renaissance, he became one of the most cited experts in global history and the processes of cross-cultural interaction in particular. He was the founding editor of the Journal of World History and co-editor of the series Perspectives on the Global Past. In 2002 he became the director of the Center for World History at UH. Most recently, Bentley was a guest professor at the Global History Center, Capital Normal University, in Beijing.

Messages of condolence and support to the Bentley family may be sent via Dr. Sun Yue at suny_wood@yahoo.com.

The ‘Ukulele: A History Book Launch

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The Ukulele book launch inviteJim Tranquada, director of communications at Occidental College in Los Angeles, will visit Honolulu to launch the book he co-wrote with the late John King, The ‘Ukulele: A History, on Saturday, July 21, 4:00 to 6:00 p.m., at Native Books/Nā Mea Hawai‘i  in Ward Warehouse (‘ewa end, 1050 Ala Moana Boulevard). He will give a short talk and gather family, friends, and ‘ukulele fans to celebrate the book’s publication. Refreshments and kanikapila (informal jam session) will follow his presentation. The public is invited to the free event and encouraged to bring their ‘ukulele to join in the fun.

A former newspaper reporter, Tranquada is a great-great grandson of ‘ukulele pioneer Augusto Dias. John King was widely acknowledged as one of the modern masters of the ‘ukulele.

Tranquada’s visit is timed so he can enjoy the 42nd Annual Ukulele Festival Hawaii on Sunday, July 22 at the Kapiolani Park Bandstand in Waikiki.

Gender, Power, and Buddhist Practice in Vietnam

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The Buddha Side
The most common description of the supernatural landscape in Vietnam makes a distinction between Buddhist and non-Buddhist “sides.” The “Buddha side” (ben phat) is the focus of this investigation into the intersection of gender, power, and religious praxis. Employing an anthropological approach to Buddhist practice that takes into account modes of action that are not only socially constructed and contextual, but also negotiated by the actors, The Buddha Side: Gender, Power, and Buddhist Practice in Vietnam, by Alexander Soucy, uniquely explores how gender and age affect understandings of what it means to be a Buddhist.

“The Buddha Side is an outstanding study. Embracing complexity and variation, Alexander Soucy deftly describes and analyzes the wide range of attitudes toward, engagements with, and meanings of Buddhism and Buddhist practice in contemporary northern Vietnam. It is a model anthropological study of religion, especially in its approach to gender, and will be of value to all scholars who seek a deeper understanding of religion as a lived human experience.” —Shaun Kingsley Malarney, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan

Topics in Contemporary Buddhism
July 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3598-9 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Tracing Obscenity Trials in Postwar Japan

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The Art of Censorship in Postwar JapanIn 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. In The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, Kirsten Cather traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line of sensational landmark obscenity trials that have dotted the history of postwar Japan. The objects of these trials range from a highbrow literary translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and modern adaptations and reprintings of Edo-period pornographic literary “classics” by authors such as Nagai Kafu to soft core and hard core pornographic films, including a collection of still photographs and the script from Oshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses, as well as adult manga. At stake in each case was the establishment of a new hierarchy for law and culture, determining, in other words, to what extent the constitutional guarantee of free expression would extend to art, artist, and audience.

“The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan is among the most lucid and engaging cross-disciplinary projects to emerge from Japan studies in recent years. It will appeal to a broad readership both inside and outside Japan studies, in particular scholars of literature, visual culture, law, and the emerging field of affect studies. Kirsten Cather accomplishes this remarkable feat by combining close readings of aesthetic, literary, and visual texts; careful exegesis of court cases and juridical documents; and detailed rendering of cultural, historical, and political contexts. The Art of Censorship demonstrates once and for all, without ever forcing the issue, that culture and politics are inexorably intertwined. I can think of no other study in the Japanese case that does it so well.” —Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Columbia University

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
July 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3587-3 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

New in the Writing Past Colonialism Series

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Sustainable CommunitiesPapua New Guinea is going through a crisis: A concentration on conventional approaches to development, including an unsustainable reliance on mining, forestry, and foreign aid, has contributed to the country’s slow decline since independence in 1975. Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development: Other Paths for Papua New Guinea, by Paul James, Yaso Nadarajah, Karen Haive, and Victoria Stead, attempts to address problems and gaps in the literature on development and develop a new qualitative conception of community sustainability informed by substantial and innovative research in Papua New Guinea.

“Sustainable Communities is an excellent work; remarkable. It manages to combine a sense of the complexity of its subject while remaining highly readable. I found it deeply probing, sustaining a sense of complexity across a multitude of terrains. Importantly, the book displays a belief in the possibilities of the village and displaced communities while retaining a sense of relevant problems.” —Dr. Nonie Sharo, author of Stars of Tagai: The Torres Strait Islanders

Writing Past Colonialism
July 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3640-5 / $27.00 (PAPER)

UH Press Around the Web

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Tom Coffman’s recent biography of Edward Nakamura, I Respectfully Dissent, is enjoying great press in the Hawai‘i media. In addition to Richard Borreca’s piece “New book makes it clear why Nakamura mattered,” the Honolulu Star-Advertiser covered the book in a review by Dave Shapiro:

“If your idealism needs a reboot, read political historian Tom Coffman’s new book I Respectfully Dissent. . . . The book provides a history of the times as well as a biography of the man, following Nakamura through his service in the 442nd, his career as a top labor lawyer, his time as a University of Hawaii regent, his term on the Supreme Court and his ‘retirement’ years as perhaps the most influential critic of the Democratic revolution that had given way to greed and malfeasance. Nakamura was defined by personal modesty, an immense intellect, a true ethical compass and an unwavering belief in democracy in its broadest sense.” (Star-Advertiser subscribers can read the full review here.)

Honolulu Civil Beat’s Chad Blair calls the biography “reverently, warmly and revealingly told”:

“[I]t is a remarkable story. . . . What Coffman has done is to share Nakamura’s story in a fresh, instructive way that reminds Hawaii of, as Lincoln put it, the better angels of our nature. . . . Coffman makes history seem less distant and gives life to a man who may have been forgotten by many.” (Read the full review here.)

Legendary sax man Gabe Baltazar will be performing tonight (Friday, July 6, 6 pm) in the Hawai’i State Art Museum’s A Star-Studded Evening of Jazz. Baltazar will also be signing copies of his autobiography If It Swings, It’s Music:

“Open it on almost any page and it will be difficult to stop reading. Written in conversational style with assistance from music fan Theo Garneau, Baltazar’s book will appeal to several distinct audiences, including jazz fans and longtime Baltazar admirers. His stories of life here in the ’30s and ’40s will fascinate anyone with an interest in what things were like ‘back in the day,’ while another section of the book shares an insiders’ look at the national jazz scene of the ’50s and ’60s.” (Read the full Honolulu Pulse (Star-Advertiser) article here.)

New Catalog Available: New Books Fall 2012-Spring 2013

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New Books 2012-2013
The UH Press New Books Fall 2012-Spring 2013 catalog is now available! To view the 1.9M PDF, click on the catalog cover image to the left.

Highlights for Fall 2012 include:

* A full color guide to planting, growing, harvesting, and enjoying your own edible garden (The Small Food Garden)

* The letters of a 19th-century “American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands” (An American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands: Letters of Carrie Prudence Winter, 1890-1893)

* A comprehensive history of the ‘ukulele that places it in a broad historical, cultural, and musical context (The ‘Ukulele: A History)

* Fully illustrated guides to Hawai‘i’s Japanese Buddhist temples (Japanese Buddhist Temples in Hawai‘i) and Japan’s Shinto shrines (Shinto Shrines: A Guide to the Sacred Sites of Japan’s Ancient Religion)

* A provocative new book examining the social worlds and interrelationships of trafficking activists along the Thai-Lao border (The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong)

* An engaging perspective on religion and popular visual media in Japan (Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan)

* A visually and descriptively rich account of the ways objects and artisans are received and their identities transformed in an Indian village (Making Faces: Self and Image Creation in a Himalayan Valley)

* A new edition in the best-selling Korean language textbook series (Integrated Korean: Intermediate 1, Second Edition)

* The definitive volume on loulu, Hawai‘i’s only native palm (Loulu: The Hawaiian Palm)

* The first English translation of a major work by “Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe,” Edogawa Ranpo (Strange Tale of Panorama Island)

* An accessible and clear explication of the oldest surviving Buddhist school (Theravada Buddhism: The View of the Elders)

Family Torn Apart Roundtable Discussion

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Join Lily Ozaki Arasato for a roundtable discussion of Family Torn Apart: The Internment Story of the Otokichi Muin Ozaki Family on Saturday, June 23, 10:30-11:30 am, at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i’s Community Gallery. Ms. Arasato is the daughter of Otokichi Ozaki, who was a Japanese language school teacher and tanka poet in Hilo. Family Torn Apart traces Ozaki’s WWII incarceration at eight different camps, his family’s life in Hawai‘i without him, and later their move to join Ozaki in the camps.

Family Torn Apart is distributed by UH Press for the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i.

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