This year's Reading the World Conference was held at the University of San Francisco on March 1 and 2, 2003. The event was well attended by hundreds of educators and interested guest. Also in attendance were many book vendors, publishers, and authors.

One of the most fascinating exhibits was the Internet Archive's bookmobile. This van contained all the hardware needed to print paperback books for around a dollar apiece. The bookmobile doesn't actually contain the data for the 20,000 and more public domain books that it can print. Instead, it has a satellite connection to the Internet that allows it to download the information from its headquarters in San Francisco. The Internet Archive's mission is to record human knowledge in easily accessible forms and make this information available to people all over the world. The Internet Archive's bookmobile is their way of demonstrating the technology needed to create books cheaply for the masses. Check out Internet Archive's website (http://www.archive.org/) to see if you can get the bookmobile to visit your school or library, and or to download your favorite public domain books. Internet Archive's records of the Internet are also quite interesting - have fun using their "Way Back Machine."

Up Coming Events

Editor's Message

Thank you Professor Mary Yu Danico for sending us such a notice. The Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) will have a regional conference at Cal Poly in Pomona, CA on March 21-23. We are unable to attend, but I am posting on our website the MS Word document (http://www.asianamericanbooks.com/aaas0303.doc) of your conference schedule for all our newsletter subscribers to read.

A special thank you goes to our guest editor Emiko Oye. Emiko volunteered her time to help us with getting this newsletter out and is now working on another AACP project. AACP has many projects and duties that we could use help on. If you would like to volunteer your time to help with any of these projects and duties, please get in touch with us.

Thank you Leanna Kim and Ken Jue for sending us your comments and book suggestions. Keep them coming everyone :).

Thank you Frances Kai-Hwa Wang of Asian American Village Online for helping to bring AACP to your readers by reprinting our last editorial on your website.

For those of you that own an AACP calendar, please note that the dates for the Bok Kai Festival are March 8th and 9th, and not the ones listed.

Leonard Chan
Editor

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aacpinc@asianamericanbooks.com

Factors that Create Leadership (Community and Purpose)
How does one create a leadership for the Asian American community? In examining African American leadership West examined two major themes that I was particularly interested in - the things that hold communities together and the concept of "Nihilism in Black America" which is one of his chapter titles. Strong communities provide armor against the loss of hope and meaning through the "values of service and sacrifice, love and care, discipline and excellence." West continues, "For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle."

What Cornell West talks about doesn't just apply to the African community but to the greater American community as a whole. The mortar that prevents the building blocks of society from falling apart are the ties that bind people to the community. These ties can be religious, civic, or both. Some tie must exist between the individual and the larger society otherwise you will have an individual with no social conscience, who will be fully capable of committing barbarities against the community. These are the people we regard as criminals and terrorists.

Few can afford to live like one of the rich people portrayed in television commercials, yet many try and most fail to achieve that unrealistic standard of living. Imagine the effect that such unobtainable media portrayals of American life have on the average Egyptian, Pakistani, or Nigerian. What results when expectations are too high or wrongly directed? Wouldn't helplessness, frustration, and anger result? Can drugs, crime, and terrorism leading to the deterioration of communities and society be far behind?

Conclusion
Who will lead us out of this? Cornell West uttered a profound truth for all Americans when he said the answer isn't in passively waiting for a Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X to lead us to the promised land. We Americans, even Asian Americans, have to make that Promised Land for ourselves. The crisis isn't just in a complacent American leadership but in the failure of people to assume leadership for themselves. The question is whether or not "ordinary" people will ever stop seeing themselves as the victims of an uncaring society and uncaring leaders and change into "extraordinary" people assuming responsibility for their own lives and their own directions. To overcome the problems of American society and to change how we are perceived around the world will require all of us to find the extraordinary person within each of us.