The Eight-Week March
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Read the opening free
4,759 words · no email, no account
No. 050 · Movements · Civil Rights
Passing the Torch
a biography of Mary Yuriko Nakahara Kochiyama
What the book is
February 21, 1965, the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Mary Yuriko Kochiyama is in the audience when Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson assassinate Malcolm X. The photograph that ran in Life magazine the next week shows her on the stage cradling his head in her lap. She is forty-three years old.
Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier, in San Pedro, California, where Mary Nakahara was born in 1921 to Japanese immigrant parents, and follows the arc through the Jerome and Topaz internment camps of the Second World War, the postwar move to Harlem, the late friendship with Malcolm X, the lifetime of activism in the Asian-American, Black, and Puerto-Rican independence movements, the long campaign for Japanese-American reparations that produced the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, and the thirty years of her life that followed — until her death in 2014 — as the elder of the movement she had helped build.
What emerges is a portrait of a Nisei activist whose forty-year political education began in a tar-paper barracks in Arkansas and whose moral compass never wavered after.
At a glance
- Subject
- Mary Yuriko Nakahara Kochiyama
- Shelf
- Movements · Civil Rights
- Written by
- Solomon Treadway
- Chapters
- 19 across 222 pages
- Narrated by
- Camille Rhodes
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01The Fishing TownRead free
- 02The Day the World Broke4,268 words
- 03Jerome4,904 words
- 04After the Wire3,537 words
- 05Harlem3,374 words
- 06Malcolm4,462 words
- 07The Apartment3,315 words
- 08The Third World Left3,448 words
- 09Political Prisoners4,337 words
- 10Redress3,559 words
- 11The Letter Writer3,122 words
- 12Bill3,337 words
- 13The Difficult Questions3,157 words
- 14The Photograph2,926 words
- 15Solidarity as Practice3,096 words
- 16Berkeley3,617 words
- 17What She Built2,932 words
- 18June First3,604 words
- 19The Bridges3,559 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 222 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90623-066-9 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes
ISBN 979-8-90623-211-3
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is Passing the Torch about?
Mary Yuriko Nakahara Kochiyama. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Passing the Torch — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,759 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 69,500 words, 19 chapters, 222 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
