News of our authors and books

Dear Blue Ear Book subscribers,

Starting today, you’ll be hearing from me and Blue Ear Books authors more regularly - not necessarily more frequently, but on a more regular schedule. I’m not going to tell you exactly what that schedule is, in case I miss a deadline from time to time, but there is one. :-)

There’s always a lot going on that we want to keep you abreast of, and related to that is that your support helps us continue to publish books covering personal experience of history worldwide, and to promote and disseminate them more robustly.

Which is to say that, if you’re a free subscriber, please consider supporting Blue Ear Books with a paid subscription to this Substack:

New and notable on the website

If you haven’t visited the Blue Ear Books website lately, have a look:

• The Books and Authors pages have been fully updated, featuring cover images, author photos, and links.

• The Veterans’ Books page has been updated with information on our commitment to publishing books by military veterans, including how we might be able to work with you, if you are a veteran with a book or book idea. Also on that page, check out David Grantham’s excellent 14-minute video interview on how he and I worked together to complete and publish his book Consequences: An Intelligence Officer’s War.

• Video recordings of virtual events Eugene Smith and Christo Brand have done with the Princeton Public Library are featured on the new Community page, along with other author events.

• The About and Contact pages have also been updated.

What our authors are up to

• The indefatigable Lisa Carrington Firmin is busy as ever with speaking engagements supporting Stories from the Front, her acclaimed book on military sexual trauma, as well as working on her next project, a book of poetry, prose, and visual art to be titled Latina Warrior, due out from Blue Ear Books this November. In the latest review of Stories from the Front, for the Military Writers Society of America, Nancy Panko writes: “Colonel Firmin’s book should be read by every newly commissioned officer and the most senior officers in any branch of service.”

• Qaisar Shareef, whose book When Tribesmen Came Calling chronicles his adventures as a Procter & Gamble Company executive in Pakistan and Ukraine, published a good new opinion piece marking the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the Pakistani newspaper The News.

• Jonathan Garfunkel, at work on a biography of the legendary farmer Akio Suyematsu, and I attended the 81st anniversary commemoration of the forcible removal to internment camps of the entire Japanese-American community of Bainbridge Island, Washington on March 30, 1942.

  

  Bainbridge Island resident Vern Nakata (left) in conversation with Blue Ear Books author Jonathan Garfunkel during the March 30 commemoration.

• Jeb Wyman’s book of oral history by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, What They Signed Up For, will soon be republished in a fresh second edition with new material and a new cover. Jeb is also hard at work on his next book, about how the post-9/11 wars changed American culture.

In the pipeline

I’m fortunate to have, at all times, multiple interesting manuscripts to edit, which also means I get to work with multiple interesting authors, many of whom become friends. Right now I’m editing:

• Light in the Fields, Yuliya Shirokova’s memoir of growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine and immigrating to Tacoma, Washington (read excerpts here and here, and read her recent diary entry here);

• Hikmet Tabak’s engrossing memoir of his lifelong Kurdish nationalist activism, including years as a political prisoner in Turkey;

• The Leadership We Need, Andrew Russell’s companion volume to Christo Brand’s memoir Doing Life with Mandela;

• Travis Vanderpool’s fascinating account of his early life in Dallas leading to a year (1967-68) as a USAF combat pilot in Vietnam, to be titled Touching the Face of God (read an excerpt here);

• Stephen Russell’s gripping narrative of deployment as a combat grunt in Iraq, which I liken to Michael Herr’s Vietnam classic Dispatches; and

• Dr. Kaleem Arshad’s memoir of the life and death of his Jamaican-born wife Dr. Jameela Arshad, who was handcuffed and died in the back seat of a police car in a New Orleans suburb, after stopping to give medical aid to an injured bicyclist.

Watch this space for more on these and other Blue Ear Books projects as they develop.

Mandela’s prison guard and friend, coming to America

Christo Brand, Nelson Mandela’s prison guard who became his lifelong friend, and his wife Estelle, with Andrew Russell, will be touring parts of the USA during the first half of November 2023. Read this one-page flyer. Confirmed engagements include Boston, Princeton, NJ, and New Orleans, with probable dates also in two Texas cities and Washington, DC. More details soon and, if you’d like Christo to visit your city, drop me a note.

And remember: You can support Blue Ear Books meaningfully, first and foremost by purchasing our authors’ books, as well as by becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack newsletter. Whether you’re a paid or unpaid subscriber, though, we welcome and appreciate you.

Jonathan Garfunkel and Ethan Casey at the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, a site of the National Park Service, on Bainbridge Island, March 30, 2023. Akio Suyematsu and his family, whose names are on the plaques in this photo, were among 227 Japanese and Japanese-American residents of Bainbridge sent to concentration camps during World War II.