Coming Events at Revolution Books

Come to our Used Book Sale, Friday-Sunday, April 4-5-6, from 12-6pm.

Donate funds now and volunteer to sort books and to staff the sale.

We have raised about $1000 towards our $3000 goal.
    
Revolution Books is even MORE important now as an intellectual, political, and cultural center for revolution as Trump/MAGA fascism drives to consolidate its grip on power and over society.

In this time when millions of people are being jolted as the Trump/MAGA fascists carry out one horror after another, what kind of future we get depends on what people understand and what they do.

This is where Revolution Books comes in. Revolution Books is where the whole world comes first, and the poetic spirit meets the search for the truth.

Where we carry a selection of a wide range of crucial literature — poetry, books on the history, culture and struggle of African American, Latine, Asian and Native peoples, women and LGBTQ, immigrants, books on science - all now under attack.

Support Revolution Books by donating books 📚📔📕 and come to the Benefit Book Sale, volunteers needed!

We need books (in good condition) of all kinds: history, fiction, African, Asian, Latine and Native American, women's, kids', science, graphic novels.

To donate books, contact us at revolutionbooksberkeley@gmail.com or call 510-848-1196. You can drop them off during our open hours: Tues-Fri from 12:30-7pm, Sat and Sun, 1-6pm.

Or to support the store, you can get a gift card for a friend or order online at www.revolutionbooks.org. Monthly sustainers needed, join Patreon.

In 1941 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 and invoked the 1798 Enemy Aliens Act, and 125,000 people of Japanese descent,
including newlyweds and American citizens Itaru and Shizuko Ina, were forcibly removed and incarcerated in remote concentration camps for years,
without charges, trial or due process.

Many of their homes, property and businesses were stolen by their white neighbors, and never returned. These fundamental violations of basic rights and US constitutional rights were a consequence of war time patriotism and racism and intended by the government to intensify that hysteria - to unite the country behind racism and patriotism against “the enemy”.

Satsuki Ina was born to Itaru and Shizuko during their imprisonment. She is a psychotherapist and an activist and weaves their story together in this moving mosaic through diary entries, photographs, clandestine letters, and heart-wrenching haiku. She reveals how this intrepid young couple navigated life,love, loss, and loyalty tests in the welter of World War II-era hysteria.

From Heyday, the publisher:

The Poet and the Silk Girl illustrates through one family’s saga the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who resisted racist oppression, fought for the restoration of their rights, and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity.

With psychological insight, Ina excavates the unmentionable, recovering a chronicle of resilience amid some of the severest blows to American civil liberties. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family’s ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Lyrical and gripping, this cautionary tale implores us to prevent the repetition of atrocity, pairing healing and protest with galvanizing power.

In this time when Trump MAGA fascism is incarcerating and deporting immigrants to hell hole prisons without due process, along with a furious onslaught of other fascist measures, when the government is declaring it is acting under the authority of very same Enemy Aliens Act which was used against the Japanese in World War II and has not been used since,

Revolution Books is proud to host Satsuki Ina and we invite everyone to come, listen and engage on these crucial questions. 

NEVER AGAIN IS NOW!

You can buy the book here.