In the spring of 1942, George Takei and his family were forcibly removed from their home in Los Angeles, subject to internment as people of Japanese descent living in the United States during World War II. George was five years old. Their next stop was a literal horse stable, where they would spend months before being moved to a series of camps, little better than prisons, where they would be surrounded by barbed wire fences and watched by armed guards.
The family would not be granted their freedom until three years later, once the internment policy was abolished, and it would be decades before George Takei would take up performance arts and eventually land his most enduring acting role, that of helmsman (and later captain) Hikaru Sulu in various incarnations of Star Trek.
In 2019, Takei published a memoir about the experience, titled They Called Us Enemy, along with co-authors Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, and illustrator Harmony Becker. (The acknowledgements suggest Takei’s husband Brad also had a significant role to play, behind the scenes). It’s well worth a read. » More... »
I don’t read a lot of memoirs. None, really. I can get behind a good biography, and maybe even an autobiography, sometimes. But the idea of slogging through a few hundred pages of the self-important reminisces of someone gazing through the lens of their own nostalgia appeals to me about as much as being FedExed the plates from whatever they ate for dinner last night. But when I heard famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had published such a book, my curiosity got the better of me and I picked up a copy. For the most part, it was worth it. 
When Netflix released Devilman Crybaby last year, I enjoyed the anime, but it made me realize that although I was cursorily familiar with the character, I had never really gone back and read Go Nagai’s original manga from the early 1970s. When I found out that Seven Seas Entertainment had released Devilman: The Classic Collection in two volumes the same year, I decided to check it out. And what a ride it is. 
I’m not sure when my LibraryLookup extension for Chrome browsers stopped working, but when I noticed it wasn’t, I took some time out to knock it back into shape. For those not familiar with the extension, it watches when you’re browsing Amazon and when it sees you looking at a book or other item that’s available from the San Francisco Public Library, it inserts a link into the Amazon page where you can find a copy or request one be shipped to your local branch. Chrome users can 
Ah, Stephen King. I’ve always had a mixed relationship with his work. Some of it, I would say, makes his reputation as one of our leading fiction writers well deserved. Other examples are just bad. Unfortunately, The Outsider, a 2018 entry into the prolific author’s oeuvre, belongs squarely in the latter category. 
All right, I’ll say it. E-readers are the best. I actually prefer to read books on an electronic device now than to have to carry around big slabs of dead trees. What’s more, if I hear one more person say, “But I like the feel and the smell of the paper,” I’ll scream. There are two distinct types of people in the world. Some of them think women’s panties are for wearing, and the others … catch my drift? But to me, the advantages of an e-reader far outweigh any nostalgic notions of paper books (except, perhaps, longevity).