| Pathfinder Around the World |
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| Interest in Pathfinder at librarians’ conference
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Hundreds stopped by Pathfinder Press booth at ALA convention |
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Nearly 20,000 librarians from around the country attended the American Library Association conference here June 24–29, held at the Washington Convention Center. “I like Pathfinder books, because they help my students think for themselves,” said one high school librarian from the Bay Area, commenting that many Pathfinder titles are speeches and writings by revolutionary and working-class leaders themselves, not books about them. He placed an order for four titles on the spot. Over 100 participants signed up to be contacted for future book orders, and a Farsi-language book distributor decided to add five of Pathfinder’s Farsi titles to his web site.
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| Readers seek out Pathfinder titles at Tehran Book Fair
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Over 11 days, hundreds of thousands streamed into 23rd Tehran International Book Fair.
Photos by Abolfazl Salmanzadeh, Mehr News Agency.
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TEHRAN—For the eighteenth year running, Pathfinder Books from the United Kingdom participated in the Tehran International Book Fair. Hundreds of thousands attended this 11-day event, which concluded on May 15. The book fair, now in its 23rd year is the largest cultural activity in Iran and the surrounding region, including Central Asia and the Middle East.
Sales of Pathfinder titles have shown a marked increase at the fair over the last two years, with 239 books and pamphlets sold this year. The exhibit was in the unsubsidized direct sales section of the fair, where publishers from around the world and their local distributors sell books.
The fair also featured exhibits by over a thousand Iranian publishers and a section where mainly scientific and academic books from 80 countries are sold at prices subsidized by the Iranian government. Click here for more.
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| Pathfinder president speaks at international conference on the Chinese around the world
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Conference participants at session at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore |
SINGAPORE—The seventh international conference of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO) convened here May 7. Almost 300 people from some 20 countries attended for three days of plenaries, panel discussions, and other activities, which focused on the emigration of millions of Chinese around the globe over the last two centuries.
Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and the Chinese Heritage Centre, located on the university campus, were the sponsors of the conference along with ISSCO. Most participants came from countries in Asia, including China, India, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. Others hailed from countries in Europe and North America, and from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Click here for more.
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| La última lucha de Lenin featured at Havana book fair panel
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Some of the hundreds of thousands of visitors entering San Carlos de la Cabana Fortress for Havana Book Fair
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“This book by Lenin is one that needs to be read today,” Fernando Rojas told a standing room-only audience at the launching of Pathfinder’s new, second edition of La última lucha de Lenin at the Havana Book Fair February 12. The book, published in English as Lenin’s Final Fight, contains writings of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin from the last year of his life, when he fought within the leadership of the Russian Communist Party to maintain the political course that had brought workers and peasants to power in 1917 in that country.
Rojas, a deputy minister of culture in Cuba, focused his remarks on the class struggle that unfolded in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and the political questions that were at the center of the revolutionary course Lenin continued to fight for during the last months of his active life. He noted that for decades many of the writings by Lenin contained in this book had been suppressed, in some cases even their existence had been denied by the Soviet government.
Click here for more.
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| Cuban publisher prints new edition of Pathfinder book Our History Is Still Being Written
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People lined up to have books signed by (on left, bottom to top) Gustavo Chui, Mary-Alice Waters, Armando Choy |
MATANZAS, Cuba, February 27—A scramble to purchase books and get them signed by the authors followed the presentation here of a new printing of the Spanish edition of Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution. The new edition was put out by the Cuban publishing house Editora Política under the Special Plan of the national Cuban Book Institute (ICL), launched in the 1990s and funded by the Ministry of Culture.
Iraida Aguirrechu, editor of the Cuban edition, chaired the event, describing with pride the book’s quality, its photographs, glossary, and notes—as well as its name and subject index, something rare in books published in Cuba. “And it has a print run of 5,000 copies, selling at just 15 Cuban pesos,” she announced.
On the platform were Generals Armando Choy and Gustavo Chui, two of the authors, and Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Pathfinder edition. The third author, Gen. Moisés Sío Wong, died February 11. The authors spoke in Matanzas as part of the Havana Book Fair’s annual programs held in many cities across Cuba.
“This book is a great tribute” to Sío Wong, Waters said. “Through it, his legacy as an exemplary revolutionary combatant is being passed on to new and future generations of proletarian internationalists in Cuba and around the world.”
Click here for more.
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| Brisk sales lead to second printing of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power
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A reader browses through Pathfinder’s new book, Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, at the March 28 Immigrants Rights Demonstration in Washington DC. Two hundred forty copies, in English and Spanish, were sold at immigrants rights events on that date in cities across the country. Only two months after the book’s release, Pathfinder has returned to the presses for a second run.
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| 700 hear Pathfinder author Armando Choy in Montreal speaking tour
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Cuban brigadier general Armando Choy, center with light shirt, arrives in Montreal |
MONTREAL—A standing-room-only crowd of more than 250 people heard Armando Choy speak at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) March 19. The meeting capped a successful five-day speaking tour here by Choy, a retired brigadier general in Cuba’s armed forces. Along with Moisés Sío Wong and Gustavo Chui, Choy is one of the three authors of the Pathfinder book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution.
The UQAM meeting was chaired by Victor Armony, director of the Observatory of the Americas at UQAM, which organizes conferences with guests from Latin America; and Patrick Véronneau, a law student. The Observatory and Pathfinder Books in Montreal were the main organizers of the five-day tour. Numerous student and faculty groups at several universities, along with organizations in the Chinese community and others, also sponsored the tour.
Click here for more.
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| PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY Interviews Pathfinder Editor
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The book industry trade journal Publishers Weekly interviewed Pathfinder editor Steve Clark for its online issue dated February 25. “With the country in the midst of a serious recession, mounting layoffs and rising unemployment,” PW writer Calvin Reid says, “socialist publishing house Pathfinder Press is committed to radical political advocacy and is not shy about declaring the mission of its publishing program.”
Pathfinder books, said Clark, “are increasingly attractive in a time
of crisis. People are open to the idea that capitalism doesn't work. The capitalist
financial system will continue to lead to the devastation of working people and
we're finding that people are responding to our books.”
Publishers Weekly is widely read by librarians, book buyers, authors, and publishers. It is produced by Reed Business Information. For the complete interview click here.
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| ‘One of year’s ten best’ says Johannesburg Mail & Guardian
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“Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution” was selected as “one of the top ten reads of the year” by the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian, a South African daily. Writing in the December 15, 2009 online edition, reviewer Darryl Accone describes the book as “even more fascinating than its title and subtitle suggest, because all three generals have much to say about the war against the apartheid army in Angola, and the decisive Angolan and Cuban victory at Cuito Cuanavale, which ultimately brought the National Party to the negotiating table. Chui headed the 90th Tank Brigade in Malanje [Angola], and lost a leg when his vehicle hit an anti-tank mine in northern Angola.” For the complete text of the article, click here. |
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| Farsi translations of nearly thirty Pathfinder books are now available
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Covers of Farsi translations of Teamster Rebellion, Woman's Evolution, Communist Manifesto, Genocide Against the Indians. |
Thirty-five titles from Pathfinder have now been translated into Farsi, the language Europeans formerly called Persian. Since 1998, Iranian publishers Talaye Porsoo and Golâzin have published a wide range of Pathfinder books, including titles by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, George Novack, and Leon Trotsky. Evelyn Reed’s books on the fight for women’s rights have been particularly popular. Several issues of the New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory distributed by Pathfinder, have also been published. More than 47,000 books have been sold. Ten more Pathfinder titles, among them the recently-released Capitalism and the Transformation of Africa, The First and Second Declarations of Havana, and Our History Is Still Being Written are currently in the works.
Over 95 million people speak Farsi. There are 70 million Farsi speakers in Iran, along with another 25 million in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and other parts of Central Asia.
Almost all of these Farsi titles are now available from Pathfinder at www.pathfinderpress.com
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