What is courage? What is strength? Perhaps it is being ready to fight for your nation even when your nation isn’t ready to fight for you. Yet right here at home, people with white skin have rights that people with black skin do not. Americans are overseas fighting World War II to help keep the world safe from Adolf Hitler’s tyranny, safe from injustice, safe from discrimination. What did it take to be a paratrooper in World War II? Specialized training, extreme physical fitness, courage, and - until the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion (the Triple Nickles) was formed - white skin. The 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, in the words of Morris, 'proved that the color of a man had nothing to do with his ability.' Morris knows that for his men to be treated like soldiers, they have to train and act like them, but would the military elite and politicians recognize the potential of these men as well as their passion for serving their country? Tanya Lee Stone examines the role of African Americans in the military through the history of the Triple Nickles, America’s first black paratroopers, who fought in a little-known attack on the American West by the Japanese. At Fort Benning, Georgia, First Sergeant Walter Morris’s men serve as guards at The Parachute School, while the white soldiers prepare to be paratroopers.  Enlisted black men are segregated from white soldiers and regularly relegated to service duties. Back on the home front, the injustice of discrimination against African Americans plays out as much on Main Street as in the military.  World War II is raging, and thousands of American soldiers are fighting overseas against the injustices brought on by Hitler. Why was their story never told? Sibert Medalist Tanya Lee Stone reveals the history of the Triple Nickles during World War II. They became America’s first black paratroopers.

Courage has no color

Also, I’ve seen my fair share of anime, and I’m a member of the generation that is old enough to have seen most of the works Napier discusses in Anime. The first chapter of the book (appropriately titled “Why Anime?”) explains why Japanese animation is amazing and exciting and well worth academic attention, and I feel like it conveys a great deal of appreciation and respect for the medium. My experience of reading the book was completely the opposite of the bad rumors I had heard. I didn’t have a particularly strong impression from the chapters on magical girls from the original 2001 edition that I had read as a freshman in college (probably because I was eighteen years old), and several people had said that the book is poorly written, gets plot points wrong, and doesn’t respect anime as a medium. If I had to guess, it probably had something to do with the bad reputation the book had (has?) among anime fans. I had taken a lot from Napier’s two earlier books on literature ( Escape from the Wasteland and The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature) as an undergraduate, so I’m not sure why it took me so long to sit down and starting reading Anime.  For whatever reason, however, I read the 2005 updated edition of Susan Napier’s book on anime during my first winter break and was so inspired that I decided to start writing about popular media, too. This is something I wouldn’t have dreamed that I’d be doing when I first entered graduate school.  Title: Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese AnimationĪlthough I consider myself a literature person, it might be better to call what I do “media studies.” I write papers about books, but I also write more than a few papers about movies, and at least half of the Japanese movies I watch and write about these days are animated.

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar