Beacon Broadside

An Unsolved Murder, A Wave of Hysteria, and Deaths in the Desert

Today's post is from Margaret Regan, author of The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands. Read more about Beacon's immigration titles at "Beyond SB1070" on Beacon.org.

Robert Krentz was a modern cowboy. When he patrolled his ranch northeast of Douglas, he rode an ATV, not a horse. No matter. A rancher was a rancher and Krentz's family had run cattle on this 35,000-spread since 1907. Krentz had been trying to restore the parched land, and his innovative water system helped convert a portion of it into a wildlife habitat. In 2008, just after its 100th anniversary, the Krentz ranch was inducted into the Arizona Ranching Hall of Fame.

Krentz was a big man, tall and heavy, and, at fifty-eight, prematurely snowy-haired. He was known as a gentle giant, given to helping out needy border crossers in this heavily traveled migrant corridor. They walked his land regularly, and once his house had been broken into. "If they come in and ask for water, I'll still give them water," he told a PBS interviewer back in 1999. "That's just my nature."

Saturday, March 27, 2010, was a cool day for early spring, only 50 degrees or so. Krentz rumbled out on his ATV to check his water lines, his dog trotting along beside him. There'd been some trouble lately in these rural Cochise County grasslands. Residents blamed migrants for a rash of home robberies. And the day before, Krentz's brother Phil had spotted some drug mules on their ranch and called the Border Patrol; agents arrested eight undocumented immigrants and picked up nearly 300 pounds of marijuana.

At some point Saturday, Rob radioed into Phil; over the crackly airwaves Phil heard the words "illegal alien."

That was the last time Rob Krentz's family heard from him. Hours later, his body was found out on his ranch, still on his ATV. He'd been shot multiple times; his dog lay wounded beside him. The death of Robert Krentz changed the conversation about immigration in the United States. The killing made national and even international news. The county sheriff pleaded for calm, noting that the murder was unsolved (it remained unsolved as of July 2010), but that didn't stop anti-immigrant groups from asserting flatly that Krentz had been shot in cold blood by an undocumented immigrant, or felled by a Mexican drug dealer. Angry citizens around the country demanded that the federal government take action.

Link Roundup

From excerpts to interviews, blog posts to online forums… Here are just a few updates from this week.

Gail Dines, author of Pornland, appeared on CNN News and in the Boston Globe this week, discussing "gonzo" pornography's grip on the young minds of an entire generation. Dines was also mentioned in a recent article on the website Independent Woman which discussed how porn addiction can ruin a marriage.

"It's time for a spiritual awakening in which we turn from obsession with future salvation and begin to savor and save the world that we are in." Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, co author of A House for Hope, in "Oil Spill Spirituality" featured on the Washington Post's On Faith.

Charles Euchner received an amazing review in the Boston Globe for his book Nobody Turn Me Around documenting the 1963 march on Washington. "Euchner's true contribution is the panoramic view he affords of this pivotal event."

Are you a pink slip away from being uninsured? Danielle Ofri talks about a new class of patient: recently laid-off without insurance.  

Fred Pearce and his latest book, The Coming Population Crash, were featured on PRI's The World. Join in on the conversation with an online forum with Pearce at PRI's The World Science.

In his book, The Boys from Little Mexico: A Season Chasing the American Dream, Steve Wilson portrays an all-Hispanic boys' soccer team as they push forward to win the Oregon state championship. An excerpt, complete with brilliant photos, can be found at This Is American Soccer, and a wonderful review appeared on the Aztexan blog.

Dylan Edwards, who is at work on a graphic book about genderqueers and FTM transsexuals, had his picture snapped at Comic-Con and is part of this great roundup of LGBT comics folks at the Prism Comics blog. 

Immigration Mythology: The Rules Apply to Everyone

The following is an excerpt from "They Take Our Jobs!" and 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky. The book was called "An indispensible guide to the current debate on immigration" by the late Howard Zinn. Read more about Beacon's immigration titles at "Beyond SB1070" on Beacon.org

Myth 7: THE RULES APPLY TO EVERYONE, SO NEW IMMIGRANTS NEED TO FOLLOW THEM JUST AS IMMIGRANTS IN THE PAST DID

One of the most oft-repeated—and most puzzling—comments regarding the debate on immigration goes something like this: "I'm not against immigration, but I'm against illegal immigration. New immigrants should play by the rules, like our parents and forebears did."

The sentiment reveals a lot about how we've been taught to think about U.S. history: we've been taught to think of this as a country of white, voluntary immigrants. The history of people who don't fall into that category is incidental, rather than central, to the story we learn in school. "The rules," though, were different for Europeans than for Africans, Asians, and Native Americans. For the latter, "the rules" meant enslavement, exclusion, and conquest.

What the people (generally of European origin) who point to "the rules" ignore, moreover, is that when their parents and grandparents came to the United States, they in fact did exactly what so-called "illegal" immigrants are doing today. They decided to make the journey, and they made it. All they had to do was get together the boat fare. The rules were different then. U.S. law explicitly limited citizenship and naturalization to white people. Nonwhites, however, were denied both entry and citizenship. Through a complex process of omission and commission, the law dictated open immigration for white people and restricted immigration for people of color. Immigration and naturalization law created, in the words of Aristide Zolberg, "a nation by design."

Americans by Choice

Danielle Ofri is a writer and practicing internist at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my Patients. You can follow Danielle on Twitter and Facebook, or visit her homepage.

Read more about Beacon’s immigration titles at “Beyond SB1070” on Beacon.org

The first thing I always do on July 4th is unfold my New York Times to where the Declaration of Independence is printed on the back page, as it is every year. I’m a fairly jaded New Yorker, but seeing the original writing every year always makes my heart skip a beat. And now that I have three young children, I’m even more thrilled to show off this documentary evidence of what it means to be American. Plus, I get to impress them with how I still remember the first paragraph by heart from my junior high school days.

This year, when I flipped through the newspaper, something else caught my eye. A full-page ad from the Carnegie Corporation declared, “Immigrants, the Pride of America.” Centered among 46 photos of immigrants with impressive resumes was a picture of the venerable American capitalist with the following text below:

“Andrew Carnegie, who founded Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911, was an immigrant from Scotland. We at Carnegie Corporation salute his legacy, along with the contributions of the millions of other immigrants who have made, and continue to make, our nation strong and vibrant. We are committed to helping immigrants become integrated into the civic fabric of our nation because enlightened citizenship is the everlasting strength of our democracy. Our national motto, E pluribus unum— “out of many, one” — continues to be an ideal we can all aspire to and a true guiding light for our nation.”

I’m not normally swayed by such unabashed patriotism, but after the steady stream of vitriol in the immigration debate, this was a welcome relief.

How to Fill the College Education Gap

Steve Wilson is the author of The Boys From Little Mexico: A Season Chasing the American Dream. Read more about Beacon’s immigration titles at “Beyond SB1070” on Beacon.org

As our representatives once again consider how to legislate immigration reform, one of their first priorities should be to reconsider one languishing immigration program--The DREAM Act.

The Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, first introduced by Senator Orrin Hatch (R) in 2001, aims to create educational equality. The legislation, currently on everybody's backburner, would allow certain undocumented immigrants to receive conditional residency if they either attend a university or join the U.S. military. To qualify, immigrants would have to enter the U.S. at age 15 or younger, graduate from an American high school, and have good moral character.

In the past, the bill has been promoted as a palatable form of immigration reform. It only affects people who entered the country as minors, presumably brought into the U.S. by their parents. These kids form a rapidly growing group today; about 2.4 million undocumented people aged 24 and under live in the U.S. right now.

But promoting the DREAM Act as legislation that should be passed, as a means of addressing some unfairness that exists because the alien minor didn't choose to enter the country, is wrongheaded. Not only is this sales pitch politically ineffective to most conservative politicians--after all the DREAM Act has been around, going nowhere, for a decade--but it misses a more dire predicament the U.S. faces today: we're running out of college graduates. The DREAM Act is a simple way to get more.

Link Roundup: Abortion Access, Porn, Mikvehs and Molasses

Here are some of this week's top Beacon author sightings:

Carole Joffe, author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars, documents America post-Roe v. Wade and how abortion is still inaccessible by many standards. In a recent article from the New York Times Magazine, Joffe is quoted for her opinions on antiabortion extremists and the “tenuous relationship between medicine and abortion.”

In a special “We Read It” blog on Newsweek.com, Gail Dines’ book Pornland received a great review calling it “an important book.” According to Dines, the adult film industry isn’t portraying love but rather promoting violence and hate. The blog also links to an earlier Newsweek article written on The Porning of America by Kevin Scott and Carmine Sarracino.

Hollowing out the Middle by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas was recently mentioned in a Huffington Post article on the rural Midwest’s enlightened youth and their migration out of small towns and into the hustle and bustle of urban environments.

The House of Secrets by Varda Polak-Sahm documents the sacred purifying Jewish ritual known as mikveh. A recent review in the Christian Century praised the book, saying: 

“Polak-Sahm mesmerizes the reader with her encounters at the mikveh...brilliantly illuminates these tensions and their religious and cultural meanings, not just intellectually but, like all good anthropologists, in a way that produces a rich understanding of people’s lives.”

Finally, we are happy to announce that Boston’s One City, One Book winner, Dark Tide, the book documenting Boston's historical Molasses Flood, will culminate its celebration on September 20th with an online discussion with the author, Steven Puleo, followed by an author event at the BPL (central branch).

Forget the Beer Summit. Shirley Sherrod’s Story Begins Our Conversation on Race

Sherrilyn Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, and is nationally recognized as an advocate in the areas of civil rights, voting rights, judicial diversity and judicial decision-making. Ifill is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century.

If you've watched the full video of the speech given by former USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod at the NAACP Freedom Fund breakfast, then you know that a hideous injustice has been perpetrated against a thoughtful, smart, sensitive, reflective, principled African American woman. She movingly described her journey as a child who had to work in the fields in the deep South to becoming a representative of the USDA. The result of this journey was her recognition that "it's not about black or white, it's about the poor." As Sherrod told her audience, "we have to work together." It's the ultimate irony that she lamented at the end of her speech that "it's a shame that we don't have white people and black people in this audience."

In fact, Sherrod's speech should be required listening for those who want to understand the arc of race and racism in America and the possibilities for redemption in this country. The world into which Mrs. Sherrod was born is one that can poison you or strengthen you. Mrs. Sherrod chose the latter path. According to Mrs. Sherrod, her father was murdered by white men who were acquitted, despite the presence of eyewitnesses at the crime scene. Her family home was threatened by violent whites. Her mother protected the family home with a gun and with courage. Sherrod decided early-on to devote her life to helping the less fortunate. She learned that the less fortunate are black and white. And she learned and encouraged her listeners to hold themselves accountable and look beyond "black and white." Sherrod's story and her compelling telling of it at the NAACP breakfast should be regarded as the opening statement in the "conversation on race" that keeps getting hijacked in this country.

Howard Bryant on the Red Sox and their African-American fans and players

Tonight at 6pm, Howard Bryant will speak at the Boston Public Library. From the BPL website: 

Howard Bryant delivers a definitive biography of Baseball Hall-of-Famer Henry Aaron. Bryant's research here is exhaustive, but it only serves to add texture and context to Aaron's compelling story, which starts with an impoverished but proud Mobile, Alabama boyhood, then follows Aaron's long and steady trajectory as the greatest home-run hitter (if not player) of his generation, ending with Aaron's public and private responses to the breaking of his home-run record by Bonds in 2007.

Howard Bryant is the author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, which was a finalist for the Society of American Baseball Research's 2003 Seymour Medal, and Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball. He is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine; appears regularly on ESPN's The Sports Reporters, ESPN First Take, and Outside the Lines; and serves as sports correspondent for NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.

Link Roundup: United We Read

This week's notable praise begins right here in the streets of Boston. As the Hub of the Universe sits down to read together (unified for the first time), here are just a few items we would like to celebrate:

In an online poll, Boston Globe readers chose Stephen Puleo's Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 as Boston's first ever "One Book, One City" selection. Coming in a close second place was Michael Patrick McDonald's memoir All Souls: A Family Story from Southie. It was exciting watching the two Beacon books neck and neck in the polling all week, and we are proud that both have had such a lasting impact on readers and our city.

The Sunday edition of the New York Post featured an opinion piece by Gail Dines, author of Pornland, about how an entire generation of men has been jaded by the overabundance of hardcore pornography at their disposal. The Washington Post's Express Night Out featured an interview with Dines about her personal experience writing this book.

Jeremy Adam Smith, author of The Daddy Shift, editor of Are We Born Racist? and the newly awarded 2010-11 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, recently appeared in the July issue of Parents magazine with his take on the reality of being a new dad as well as the expectations and responsibilities of staying home. You can also watch him on the Today Show in a segment on stay-at-home dads.

Steve Wilson's book, The Boys from Little Mexico, paints a portrait of an all-Hispanic boys' soccer team in Oregon en route to the state championship. In a special soccer book post commemorating the World Cup on Nancy Pearl's Book Lust blog, Wilson's book received notable mention as a must-read. The House of Soccer blog also gave it a great review, which makes us want to shout, "Gooooooaaaaaallll!"

The Daddy Shift: Random Memories of the Today Show

Jeremy Adam Smith is the author of The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family and the co-editor of Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology. This post originally appeared on his blog, Daddy Dialectic.

So, apparently, on Tuesday I was a guest on The Today Show:

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1. When I walked up to the studio, the guest entrance was besieged by awe-struck teenage girls. Were they waiting for me? Er, no, they were there for a supernaturally handsome dude I later learned was Peter Facinelli, one of the stars of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse:

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Peter and I were ushered into the studio together; he gave me the once-over to make sure I wasn't somebody famous, and then ignored me. That's OK, because I didn't recognize him either, and I would rather gouge out my own eyes than watch The Twilight Saga.

What Married Same-Sex Couples Owe to Hippie Communes

Today's post is from Nancy D. Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law. Polikoff is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches Sexuality and the Law and has taught Family Law for more than 20 years. This post originally appeared on her Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage blog.

I'm guessing most married same-sex couples think they have little in common with the hippie communes of the 1960's and 70's. Free-loving hippies challenged the fabric of American society, including the nuclear family, while most married same-sex couples, or at least the organizations that speak for them, are busy presenting gay marriage as anything but a threat to heterosexual family life.

Well, think again. Last week's ruling in Gill v. OPM demonstrates just how much debt all gay rights advocacy owes those hippies.

After rejecting every asserted justification for excluding Massachusetts married couples from the legal consequences of being married under federal law, US District Court Judge Joseph Tauro said this:

What remains, therefore, is the possibility that Congress sought to deny recognition to same-sex marriages in order to make heterosexual marriage appear more valuable or desirable. But to the extent that this was the goal, Congress has achieved it "only by punishing same-sex couples who exercise their rights under state law." And this the Constitution does not permit. "For if the constitutional conception of 'equal protection of the laws' means anything, it must at the very least mean" that the Constitution will not abide such "a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group."

The citation for the last sentence in that paragraph is a case called USDA v. Moreno, decided in 1973. It's the case that formed the primary precedent for the Court's landmark gay rights ruling in 1996, Romer v. Evans.

Moreno was a challenge to an amendment to the statute governing the federal food stamp program. When enacted in 1964, eligibility for food stamps was determined on the basis of household size and income. A "household" included any group of related or unrelated individuals who basically shopped for food and cooked in common. In 1971, Congress amended the law to exclude households whose members were not all related.

The Boston Globe's Citywide Read: Vote Now!

Two Beacon Press books, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald, and Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo, are leading the voting for the Boston Globe's first citywide read program. From the Globe: 

After lamenting the absence of a One Book, One City program in Boston, the Globe decided to launch an experiment: a citywide reading program of its own. The comments that followed the story after it ran in the Books section and on Boston.com confirmed what we suspected — local citizens are certainly among the country's most opinionated readers. What better place to host a reading program than Boston? Here's how the Globe online book club will work: What follows is a list of 10 books, many of which were culled from readers' suggestions. The list — we hope — has something for everyone; each book certainly has plenty of meat for discussion. The only theme: All the books have local interest. Readers will have one week to vote for their pick (voting closes July 13). Once the winner is announced participants will then have a month to read the book. At the end of the month Boston.com will host a discussion with an expert moderator.

Go to the Globe website and vote now for the title you'd like to read. The poll closes tomorrow, so cast your vote now!

Overpopulation is the Wrong Focus For Environmentalists

Today's post is from Fred Pearce, author of The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet's Surprising Future. Pearce is an environmental consultant at New Scientist and a weekly columnist and investigate journalist for the Guardian. This post originally appeared at TriplePundit.

A green myth is on the march. It wants to blame the world's over-breeding poor people for the planet's peril. It stinks. And on World Population Day, I encourage fellow environmentalists not to be seduced.

The actor Jeremy Irons has announced that he plans to make an Al-Gore style movie about the population problem. The screen idol with a social conscience — who famously has seven homes and a pink castle in Ireland – says his inconvenient truth is that "there are just too many of us."

Overpopulation is driving global warming, mass starvation and accumulating pollution, making the planet uninhabitable. Irons thinks a new plague, like the Black Death 700 years ago, is going to be nature's way of solving the problem.

He is far from alone in thinking that all efforts to save the world are doomed unless we "do something" about continuing population growth. But this is nonsense. Worse, it is dangerous nonsense.

Link Roundup: Boston and Beyond

While many see July as a time for extra vacation days, our authors are hard at work promoting their books both across the country and here in Boston. With topics ranging from controversy over pornography to violence in our prison systems, here is a look at our authors' achievements this week:

In her new book, Pornland, Gail Dines analyzes how the lucrative pornography industry has-- through violence, racism, and sexism—destroyed how the public views sexuality. (The two excerpts available on Scribd have been very popular.) At the Huffington Post, Dines discusses the research process for such a controversial subject. The blog at Ms. Magazine has posted the first two parts of a three part interview. At the Guardian, Dines's work sparked debate in the comments stream. Her interview at Pulse was picked up by Andrew Sullivan and more debate ensued.

Writer and historian Steve Puleo takes a look at the birth of Boston as a major metropolis in America in his new book A City So Grand. A fantastic review of Puleo's book can be found on Boston.com, and be sure to read a free excerpt on Scribd.

In Wealth and Our Commonwealth, Chuck Collins warns about the possibility of a permanent aristocracy in America. In an article for The Nation, Collins makes a connection to Teddy Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech and the dangers that accompany giving too much money and power to a select few.

California Lawyer praises Carlos Ball's From the Closet to the Courtroom, saying "[Ball] offers lawyers an enlightening shift of focus, enabling us to understand who 'makes law' in this country, and what motivates them to do so." The book examines five of the most groundbreaking cases that have shaped LGBT rights in the United States; in the Huffington Post, Ball looks at a recent victory.

The Sentencing Project, a national organization that works towards fair and effective criminal justice in America, gives a spectacular review to David Chura's I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine.

In response to youth violence in the city of Boston, officials have created 400 jobs for at-risk teenagers according to Boston.com. Ninth graders in the program will receive a copy of Michael Patrick MacDonald's memoir All Souls, which recounts his childhood growing up Irish Catholic in the violence of South Boston.

Trashing Thurgood Marshall

Sherrilyn Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, and is nationally recognized as an advocate in the areas of civil rights, voting rights, judicial diversity and judicial decision-making. Ifill is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century. This article originally appeared at The Root, where she is a frequent contributor.

The second day of the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court was marked by some substantive dialogue, respectful banter and even an exchange of ethnic humor between the nominee and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Republicans and Democrats alike seemed to have forgotten the previous day's tensions.  But for many of us who'd sat in stunned silence while Republicans members of the committee used their opening statements to unleash an orchestrated disparagement of the record and legacy of Supreme Court justice and civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall, the wounds still felt raw.

The invocation of Marshall (35 times by Republicans) was a surprising new low, even for the shameless opportunism of modern confirmation hearings. At first it seemed astonishing as senator after senator -- Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), John Cornyn (R-Texas) -- disparaged nominee Kagan's "association" with Thurgood Marshall. But the abandonment of the "Marshall as slur" tactic on day 2 suggests that the Republican senators' opening-day sucker punch may have backfired.

A Deeply American Experience: Excerpt from Jefferson’s Pillow

Roger Wilkins is a professor of history at George Mason University. He was cited in the 1972 Pulitzer Prize award to The Washington Post for his coverage of Watergate. The following is a short excerpt from his book Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism. His book examines the founding fathers and their contradictory notions of independence and slavery in the newly-formed United States.

We Americans have a wonderful political legacy that is, in part, the work of people who owned people very much like me. It is possible that some of those they owned were among my ancestors. The lives of these founders and their characters were indelibly stained by that fact, though the heinousness of the crime may be relieved a bit by the fact that they were born into an existence anchored in slavery.

Fourth of July in the Borderlands: Praying for Rain

The following post is from Margaret Regan, the author of The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands. Regan's book chronicles firsthand accounts of the militarized borders and the ultimate human struggle and sacrifice to experience the freedom and independence in the United States.

A hot wind swept through the Arizona desert on the first day of July, pushing gray clouds across the sky and carrying the welcoming smell of rain.

The dampness in the air gave some small hope to this parched land. During all of June, it rained not a single drop in southern Arizona. The temperatures spiked above 100 degrees on twenty-two days, including sixteen days in a row during the last two weeks of the month. On one day, June 23, the mercury shot up to 109.  

The region’s powerful summer thunderstorms—the monsoons—haven’t started yet but everyone’s praying for rain. Last week in Tucson, in a traditional celebration on the feast day of San Juan Bautista—St. John the Baptist—on June 24, neighbors carried his statue around on the banks of the dried-up Santa Cruz River, in hopes that the saint would baptize the borderlands. So far, the saint hasn’t answered their prayers.

Excerpt from “The Muse of Revolution”

Nancy Rubin Stuart is an award-winning author, journalist and writer-producer who specializes in women and social history. Her previous books include The Reluctant Spiritualist, American Empress, and Isabella of Castile. In connection with her work she has appeared on several national television series and on NPR's "Morning Edition." Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and many national magazines. She currently serves as one of the directors of the Women Writing Women's Lives Seminar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Stuart's book, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, follows Mercy Otis Warren and her connection to some of the most notable players in the American Revolution. With a sense of liberty and independence, Stuart chose the following excerpts documenting Warren's satirical poems and plays pertaining not only to the events that led to war, but also to her revolutionary ideas of women's rights.

The Muse of the Revolution

Link Roundup: Independence and Freedom for All

Independence Day reminds us not only of our rights as Americans, but also of our rights as human beings on a global scale. This week, our authors have been using their freedom of speech to promote further rights in fields such as education, religion, and LGBT law. Take a look at what they have been up to.

In Steve Wilson's book, The Boys from Little Mexico, one all-Hispanic boys' soccer team surpasses ethnic boundaries and personal struggles to win the Oregon state championship. Recently quoted in Newsweek, Wilson praises the Mexican-American players in the World Cup and their drive for success. The Oregon newspaper, the Woodburn Independent, ran a review for Wilson's book, praising it for taking the local story to a national level.

In his book From the Closet to the Courtroom, Carlos Ball discusses in rich detail five lawsuits that have affected LGBT rights for Americans. In a poignant article for the Huffington Post, Ball poses the question "Is it time for gay federal judges?" Diversity Inc. posted a short interview with the author and the Advocate.com recently ran an excerpt from the book on the topic of high school harassment. An outstanding review of the book was recently posted on Lambda Literary stating "[Ball] appeals to the hearts of his readers by fleshing out the human players in each chapter without sacrificing scholarship."

Harassment often led to violence for our next author, Geoffrey Canada, whose memoir Fist Stick Knife Gun recounts the dangers of growing up in the South Bronx. Waiting for Superman—a new documentary on America's failing education system featuring Canada—was mentioned in Entertainment Weekly. As buzz for the film begins to grow, Geoffrey Canada speaks in a brief interview about his personal feelings towards his childhood when his ideal image of Superman was rocked by the harsh realities of life.

Education is failing in both American schools and juvenile penitentiary systems according to David Chura, author of I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine. Listen to an interview with Chura on KPFA's Flashpoints (starting 43 minutes into the program) discussing the realities of juvenile incarceration. Listen to another interview with Chura on WMUA Writer's Voice where he describes how the war on crime is synonymous with the war on kids.

Finally, in celebration of UUA's General Assembly in Minneapolis, Beacon authors John Buehrens and Rebecca Ann Parker appeared on the radio program State of Belief to discuss their views on social activism and religion. In their book, A House for Hope, the authors describe a shared momentum among religious progressives and the impact they have on the 21st century. Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith, also appeared on the show, discussing his interactions with the Dalai Lama in strengthening Buddhist-Muslim ideals.