Acclaimed Japanese American musician Kishi Bashi visits The Community Library as part of a multi-event trip to Idaho organized by Friends of Minidoka and the Minidoka National Historic Site. The event is in honor of the annual Day of Remembrance, which commemorates the signing of Executive Order 9066 that led to the exclusion, forced removal, and unjust incarceration of over 125,000 Japanese Americans during WWII, including at Minidoka. Kishi Bashi will present his award winning A Song Film by Kishi Bashi: “Omoiyari” followed by a discussion and live musical performance. “Omoiyari” is a Japanese word that means to have sympathy and compassion towards another person. Reserve your seat at www.comlib.org. In A Song Film by Kishi Bashi: “Omoiyari”, Kishi Bashi embarks on a transformative journey to confront his heritage and reconcile the painful history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Inspired by the rising tide of discrimination against marginalized communities, Kishi Bashi delved into the untold stories of incarceration survivors and composed an album titled Omoiyari that captures their experiences. Kishi Bashi is the pseudonym of singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Kaoru Ishibashi. Born in Seattle, Washington, Ishibashi grew up in Norfolk, Virginia where both of his parents were …

“The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy” is a new book out in 2023 from journalist James Risen centering on Frank Church, a senator from Idaho from 1957-1980. Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed—from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI—would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and reams …

The eighty-five–mile-long Columbia Gorge forms part of the border between Oregon and Washington and is one of the nation’s most historic and scenic landscapes. Many of the region’s cultural divisions boil over here—urban versus rural, west of the mountains versus east—as well as clashes over private property rights, management of public lands, and tribal treaty rights. In the early 1980s, as a new interstate bridge linked Portland to rural counties in Washington, the Gorge’s renowned vistas were on the brink of destruction. Nancy Russell, forty-eight years old and with no experience in advocacy, fundraising, or politics, built a grassroots movement that overcame seventy years of failed efforts and bitter opposition from both Oregon and Washington governors, five of the six Gorge counties, Gorge residents, and the Reagan administration. While building her campaign, Russell stopped subdivisions, factories, and government neglect through litigation brought by her organization, Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and last-second land purchases by the Trust for Public Land. Initially ignored, then demonized, Russell had her tires slashed and her life threatened. The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act barely passed—on the last day of the congressional session in 1986—and was signed by a reluctant President Reagan. Russell …

One was born in a small town in Texas, in a family with little to its name; the other, sixteen years earlier, was the grandson of a Duke whose ancestral home was one of Britain’s greatest palaces. When the Second World War began, Dwight David Eisenhower was a little-known Lt. Colonel in a United States Army which numbered under 200,000, just the 19th largest in the world. Winston Spencer Churchill was approaching his 65th birthday, with a mercurial political career that had already spanned four decades. Just a few months later, he and Britain would stand alone against a totalitarian power the likes of which the world had never seen. The leadership of Winston Churchill in the critical days of 1940 ensured that the free world would survive its greatest challenge. Four years later, it fell to Dwight Eisenhower to command the largest amphibious invasion in history. Had either of them failed, the course of modern history would have been radically different. Despite their disparate backgrounds, fate and destiny brought these men together. Sometimes they agreed and other times stood apart but together they helped determine the future of the world for much of the 20th century. Join acclaimed Churchill …