Friday, June 6, 2014

June 6, 2014: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: The Chinese Exclusion Act

[For the last couple years I’ve featured a summertime series on some AmericanStudies books you can pack along with the sunscreen and cold beverages. As summer approaches, it feels right to share some more beach reads—please share your own favorite or future summer page-turners for a weekend post we can all bring with us to the shore or the pool!]

On a reiterated offer as my latest book enters its second year.
It is, I know, very poor form to offer up one’s own book as a beach read recommendation. But on the other hand, we write to be read—and as I’ve worked hard to move my writing and books more and more into the kind of readable and engaging public scholarship category about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, I hope that the most recent one in particular, The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America (2013), would not be out of place in your summer reading pile. And here at almost exactly the one-year anniversary of that book’s publication, I wanted to reiterate an offer I made back then: that I’m more than happy to send along a free e-copy of the book to anyone who is interested (feel free to email me if you don’t want to leave your email address in comments).
If you want to get more of a sense of the book before requesting it, I’d direct you to two brief online pieces of mine:
1)      This one, which highlights the amazing life and community at the heart of my third chapter;

2)      And this one, which highlights the tragic yet inspiring collection of poems that connect to the histories of immigration, law, and identity at the heart of the book.
Again, we write to be read, and with this book in particular I have made it my central goal to share my writing as widely and fully as possible (hence the year of book talks, for example). So I’ll say it one more time—if you’re interested in bringing the book to the beach, or the pool, or camping, or anywhere else, and you have the ability to read online or on a device, please let me know and I’d be very happy to email you an e-copy. Thanks!
Crowd-sourced post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So last chance ahead of the weekend post: what would you recommend for a good beach read? What are you hoping to get to by the pool this summer?

No comments:

Post a Comment