Goodbye Miss Butterfly

With that, neither of them said anything for a few moments and both realized the song had ended. Looking at each other they imagined an audience applauding to that musical exchange. Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton would have been jealous had they been there in the audience. They were perhaps busy that morning playing somewhere or maybe even rehearsing for their groundbreaking concert in Carnegie Hall that would take place a few weeks later in January. It was the first time a jazz ensemble had been allowed to perform at Carnegie. Colin and Piper didnt know it, but theres had just been an opening act for themselves, music, and jazz. It would be a good year for improvisation, that year 1938, a

Sumie Kawakami is an experienced and intelligent reporter who manages to get her subjects to bare their souls and share their anxieties in a book I found hard to put down. ” —Jeff Kingston, The Japan Times "Kawakami presents a frank portrait of Japanese women today, via these compulsively readable, expertly crafted essays. Further kudos should go to Yuko Enomoto for her seamless translation.” —Suzanne Kamata, author of Losing Kei “A tartly written, stereotype-blasting and beautifully made book.” —Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica “Refreshingly intense” —Colleen Mondor, Bookslut "Smart and lively and thoughtful and moving, like a good Studs Terkel without encyclopedic pretensions." —Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of the best-selling A Series of Unfortunate Events “Full of rich details of contemporary Japan ... in the end readers should understand why Madame Butterfly no longer exists. Or perhaps never existed at all.” —Todd Shimoda author of The Fourth Treasure and 365 Views of Mt. Fuji "An eye-opening, detailed look at the private, intimate lives of Japanese women ... This is an intelligent and authoritative work, covering everything from adultery to sex volunteers and the role of fortune tellers in Japanese romance. It is at once illuminating and entertaining, credible and so engrossing you will find it difficult to put down." — Robert Whiting, author of Tokyo Underworld, The Meaning of Ichiro and You Gotta Have Wa Sumie Kawakami’s Goodbye Madame Butterfly is an intimate look at the sex lives of Japanese people from a female perspective. This groundbreaking work of nonfiction will shatter the myth of the pliant, coy Japanese woman and replace her with a complex, erotic, sexually charged and fiercely independent woman who struggles to find her place in a male-dominated society.

Driven by his dream to write and stage an epic stage production of interwoven Chinese novelsWittman Ah Sing, a Chinese-American hippie in the late '60s.

Inspired by the sight of some school kids releasing butterflies up into the sky, a young boy turns into a "butterfly scientist" and helps his teacher and classmates care for some caterpillars as they grow into butterflies. Includes several pages of facts on the topic.

Elderberry Wine, Vintage 2010 is an anthology of student writing from the Mature Learning Program at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, offers something for everyone. The pieces in this collection range from Poetry-sonnets and haiku, free verse, meter and rhyme; to fiction both fanciful and serious; and nostalgia for the past and visions of the future. Come along on adventures in a swampy town in the American South in the 1930s, an apartment building in the squalid northwest Portland of the 1970s, and the lair of a drug lord in the Caribbean of the 1980s. Exploring all manner of topics, from the natural world to the lives of houses to human life and aging, this collection presents a wide range of unique views and perspectives on life with something for everyone. Looking for Love The little green lizard struts across the woman's porch railing with a proprietary air, then suddenly stops and flicks down a flap of vermilion colored skin from his throat and freezes in place. He bobs his head up and down several times before moving on. Wordless-soundless but with such eloquence of expression does he signal his desire for a mate that, without conscious intent, the woman touches fingers to her throat, then catches herself and with a rueful smile, nods back. Herb Stokes, long-time creative writing student

A fascinating look at Hollywood’s most turbulent decade and the demise of the studio system—set against the boom of the post–World War II years, the Cold War, and the atomic age—and the movies that reflected the seismic shifts Hollywood in the 1950s was a period when the film industry both set conventions and broke norms and traditions—from Cinerama, CinemaScope, and VistaVision to the epic film and lavish musical. It was a decade that saw the rise of the anti-hero; the smoldering, the hidden, and the unspoken; teenagers gone wild in the streets; the sacred and the profane; the revolution of the Method; the socially conscious; the implosion of the studios; the end of the production code; and the invasion of the ultimate body snatcher: the “small screen” television. Here is Eisenhower’s America—seemingly complacent, conformity-ridden revealed in Vincente Minnelli’s Father of the Bride, Walt Disney’s Cinderella, and Brigadoon, among others. And here is its darkening, resonant landscape, beset by conflict, discontent, and anxiety (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Asphalt Jungle, A Place in the Sun, Touch of Evil, It Came From Outer Space) . . . an America on the verge of cultural, political and sexual revolt, busting up and breaking out (East of Eden, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Sweet Smell of Success, The Wild One, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Jailhouse Rock). An important, riveting look at our nation at its peak as a world power and at the political, cultural, sexual upheavals it endured, reflected and explored in the quintessential American art form.

Songwriters dramatically captured the details of how Americans lived, thought and changed in the first half of the twentieth century. This book examines 1033 songs about WWI and WWII wars, presidents, Women’s Suffrage, Prohibition, the Great Depression, immigration, minority stereotypes, new modes of transportation, inventions, and the changing roles of men and women. America invited immigrants and went to war to ensure democracy but within its borders, lyrics display intolerant attitudes toward women, blacks, and ethnic groups. Songs covered labor strikes, communism, lynchings, women voting and working, love, sex, airships, radio, telephones, the lure of movies and new movie star role models, drugs, smoking, and the atom bomb.History books cannot match the humor, poignancy, poetry and thrill of lyrics in describing the essence of American life as we moved from a rural white male dominated society toward an urban democracy that finally included women and minorities.