The current featured contributor to
Writers Read: Greg Robinson, author of
By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans and
A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America.
His entry begins:
While I like reading many kinds of books, fiction and nonfiction, I have no real system that governs my choices. The only important 
determinant of my reading is that I tend to study more attentively any book that seems directly relevant to my research or teaching, and take notes as I read. Conversely, I try to find other books to read for pleasure, to avoid too much of a “busman’s holiday.” I usually read two books at a time. One is a hardcover or large paperback that I keep at home, and particularly for unwinding before I go to sleep. I just finished reading (partly in French and partly in English) Claude Manceron’s 5-book series The French Revolution. He paints a really broad canvas, centering on the earlier life, before 1789, of all sorts of characters who will reappear in the revolution. He seems very fair and considered in his judgments. I particularly appreciate that he gives some depth to his portrait, positive and negative, of Marie Antoinette. I get irritated by the latter-day mythologizing and
even hero-worship (à la Kirsten Dunst) of this not only frivolous but deeply reactionary and at least arguably traitorous woman....[read on]
Greg Robinson, a native of New York City, is associate professor of history at l'Université du Québec à Montréal.
Read
more about A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America at the publisher's website, and visit
Greg Robinson's faculty webpage at l'Université du Québec à Montréal.
Writers Read: Greg Robinson.
--Marshal Zeringue
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