The following are summaries of Dr. Pasick's books in progress:

The Origins Of Leadership: Personal Stories From The Top 100 Leaders In Rwanda

Summary:

In 2006-2007 I spent seven weeks in Rwanda as a writer, consultant, and world citizen. Meeting government leaders and hearing their stories galvanized me to tell-not a story of despair-but one of recovery against all odds. The book is now in proposal form. This is the topic:

• In 1994, a horrific genocide swept Rwanda for 100 days. By its end, over one million people had been murdered, and another three million displaced.
• Two weeks thereafter, a provisional government was in place, led by the Rwanda Patriotic Front and its militia, which ended the killing.
• Within five years, stability in all sectors was accomplished, and by the 2003 elections, Rwanda was being hailed at one of the most progressive nations on earth.

The Origins of Leadership tells the story of that remarkable recovery, and the stories of the men and women who made it happen.

Excerpt:

The story out of Rwanda is no longer about the horrific, harrowing genocide in 1994. Ongoing accounts of 21st century human cruelty in Darfur, Sudan, and Iraq have nearly eclipsed Rwanda in the 'man's inhumanity to man' category. A most compelling, and heretofore untold story in Rwanda is how a small group of men and women re-built an entire nation, leaning on both traditional African practices and Western social justice principles

How - as one of the poorest, most traumatized, and smallest nations on earth-did Rwanda accomplish gender equality, non-violence, reconciliation and unity, land sharing, and decentralization? How exactly did only a handful of people make it work, and make it happen so quickly? Alongside the success, what were the policy disasters, and failures?

The Origins of Leadership will answer those questions through a 250-page collective biography of the men and women who inserted themselves into the thick of extraordinary times. What were the roots of their leadership capacities? What was it like to be a leader during a time when Rwanda was teetering on the edge of chaos, even while your own murdered relatives might lay in mass graves?

As we read these individual accounts of becoming leaders, we also follow a narration of the breathtaking, hair-raising events and challenges in Rwanda from approximately 1990 to the present.

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Changing Faces: Six Mixed-Race Families 100 Years After Miscegenation

Summary:

Changing Faces is a creative non-fiction book which integrates a series of personal recounts with historical research about mixed-race Filipino-American families, from the turn of the century to the present. Not only do ethnic Filipinos form the majority among Asian immigrates to the US, their marriages constitute the earliest interracial unions in the nation. Moreover, for each individual, the Philippine Islands' symbiotic relationship with America has been difficult to reconcile. These stories make for good drama.

The book draws from ten years of scholarly work, and a personal journey culminating in a search for my Filipino roots, in two provinces in the Philippine Islands.

Excerpt:

The first person to ask me about my racial makeup was a girl named Evelyn. She was a relative newcomer to our grade class, from Boston, and I'm guessing that had already been teased for talking funny, so her radar for differences was already activated. I remember her hair and skin were very, very blond, and she wore plaid skirts and cardigan sweaters.

"What ARE you?" she said, passing my desk one day.

I remember snapping open my blue cloth looseleaf binder after she asked her question. I knew what she was getting at. I got busy reorganizing the binder-and my identity-into sections, one for each subject.

Without stopping to look up, I said, "One-fourth Filipino."

I liked saying it this way because it conferred a certain specialness and difference. There was neither pride, nor shame, just a statement of mathematical proportion and accuracy.

"Oh" Evelyn said, as if I'd said something mildly newsworthy, like 'We're going to have gym, and not art, today.' She walked back to her seat.

From a very early age, even before I knew what the words, 'mestiza,' 'half-breed,' or 'quatroon' meant, I knew my blood was racially mixed. My grandfather Pio's Filipino blood mixed with a stream of Norwegian-German heritage that gave my father his height and contributed to a strong gene for alcoholism; two other came from my mother's people in Tennessee. Those went with chewing tobacco, washtubs, country ham, and homemade biscuits.

By deduction, I knew my father was half-Filipino. His skin was slightly darker, his eyes were nearly black, and he had a flat nose beneath almond shaped eyes. My girlfriends thought he was good-looking, and so did I. In fact, his brooding handsomeness overrode his Asian features. He was 'exotic.' When we lived in a New York City suburb, and until we moved to the Midwest, I have no recall of ever being worried that my father would attract quizzical, racist looks from my peers or neighbors, or that anyone would ask that soon-to-be-dreaded question, 'What are you?'

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