Hello AACP Newsletter Readers.

Apologies for being late with this newsletter. We just had a pretty busy April.

It was great seeing those of you that were at the APAHE conference in Anaheim. This was our first event in Southern California since before the Pandemic.

It was also great to be at the Cupertino Cherry Blossom Festival this past weekend.

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Our first article “What Everyone Should Know About Methods for Changing the World” is a summary of a fascinating episode of the radio program “Hidden Brain” called “How to Change the World.”

With people and governments taking violent approaches to changing the world, Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth studied over a hundred years of historical data to determine whether violent or nonviolent movements are more successful at making change.

Please read this article and listen to the radio interview to learn about Prof. Chenoweth’s findings. It will give you hope.

For our second article, “Willie Ito- The Silent Voice Finds Its Song,” Hal Kataoka writes about pioneering Asian American animator Willie Ito.

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For our book selection we have six books for Earth Day. A number of these books were discovered when a patron asked us to compose a list of books dealing with environmental justice and climate change.

To Change a Planet, by award winning author Christina Soontornvat, gently illuminates the causes of climate change as well as how our individual and collective actions can make the world better.

Rise Up and Write It, by Nandini Ahuja, is about some children that start a movement to convert an empty lot into a haven for butterflies that have disappeared from their neighborhood. The book comes with a real example letter, petition, and poster for readers to start their own movement.

Please check out the others too.

The remainder of our book selection contains books for May’s AAPI Heritage Month.

There is a book about architect I.M. Pei (The Glass Pyramid), a book on activist Minoru Tonai (Unbreakable: A Japanese American Family in an American Incarceration Camp), actor Bruce Lee (Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America), author Bich Minh Nguyen has a new memoir (Owner of a Lonely Heart: A Memoir of Motherhood and Absence), a book about singer Nobuko Miyamoto (Not Yo' Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution), a book about World War II Japanese American naval intelligence agent Douglas Wada (Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, a Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor), and a fascinating book about Asians that travel the Pacific during the Manila galleons period (The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History).

There are many more wonderful books in this month’s selection. So please check them all out.

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Thank you very much Hal Kataoka for giving us the use of your interesting article.

As always, thanks to all of our editors and contributors.

Have a wonderful Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month!

Hope to see you at some of the upcoming events.