Red White & Blind

I was delighted that the venerable KPFA radio interviewed me this past week here in the Bay Area.

I appeared on the station’s Project Censored show and discussed propaganda, censorship, and media consciousness — all great topics — and of course the new book Red White & Blind.

I was excited for the interview. KPFA is a formidable news institution here in the Bay Area, and it was one of my biggest media appearances to date. I thought it went well, but listen when you can and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

KPFA has anchored Left media in the Bay Area for decades. It is a flagship of the Pacifica Network of radio stations, which includes WBAI in New York and KPFK in Los Angeles.

Tony’s Story

Tony Brasunas grew up on a commune in West Virginia. Before leaving for China, as a teenager at Amherst College, he studied Chinese, music, writing, and Computer Science, and meandered into a thoughtful and lonely social and political conservatism.

Directionless after college, perhaps expecting something more from the planet, Tony applied just after the deadline to Princeton in Asia, and he was swiftly bundled off to Guangzhou, China, to teach English. The ensuing journey broke him open. His body tasted death in hospitals and Tibetan monsoons, his heart opened up and slammed shut and opened again, and some unknown inner sage awoke and suggested he trust his intuition.

Double Happiness: One Man’s Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China (December 2013, Torchpost) masterfully retells that awakening against a backdrop of a modern, changing China.

Excerpts from the manuscript have appeared in the book China, an anthology of travel writing on China published by Travelers’ Tales Press, and in Travelmag, a British online travel magazine.

Writing ‘Double Happiness’

The second journey Tony undertook was writing it all down, editing it, and transforming the journey that changed his life into a story and a book. His third journey was launching a campaign on Kickstarter to gather the money and energy to publish it. And this is his fourth journey — sharing his story with the world.

In the years since China, Tony has slaked bouts of wanderlust by crisscrossing the Andes of Peru, backpacking through Germany and France during a World Cup, and sneaking illegally into Tibet.

Tony speaks passable Mandarin, Spanish, and English, and perhaps that’s why he was asked one fragrant spring evening in Kunming, China to play guitar on a radio station. The host on Kunming’s STAR 101.8 FM asked him why his songs were about a young woman. “Ta shi shei?” (Who is she?) inquired the host. Tony had met her at a nearby cafe, he replied, and she had become his tutor, his teacher of the Chinese that is spoken aloud, not just written in textbooks. “She’s on the roof right now with a radio,” Tony added with a smile. “She has a basket of strawberries and is hoping to hear me play guitar.”

Two weeks later, Tony was arrested and interrogated in Tibet.

The Timeline

Double Happiness was published internationally in trade paperback on December 12, 2013. Hardcover and e-book versions followed in January 2014. The audiobook, narrated by Brasunas, came out in January 2015.

In May 2014, at the Paris Book Festival, Double Happiness won best in Biography / Autobiography. Press release >

In July 2014, Double Happiness was named ForeWord Travel Book of the Year, Silver Winner. Press release >

In September 2014, the Living Now Book Awards (recognizing “Books For Better Living”) named Double Happiness best inspirational memoir.

The Publisher – Torchpost

All blogs, magazines, newspapers, and social media are welcome to request publicity materials, interviews, or review copies of Double Happiness.

Torchpost 415-647-8587 1612 Bay Street Alameda, CA 94501 info {at} torchpost {dot} com www.torchpost.com/books/Double-Happiness

Download Mini Media Kit

For a “white paper” description of the book, a normal-resolution book cover image, and a normal-resolution author photo, download the miniature media kit [ZIP].

Author Photos

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Download Book Cover Images

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It’s been a blast appearing on podcasts and independent media shows in the weeks since I finished the manuscript. If you’d like to get a sneak peek into the revelations of Red, White & Blind before it’s published, listen today to one of my podcast appearances listed below.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how I did and your advice on how I could improve. I was nervous on the first podcast, probably too casual on the second, and failed to stand up for myself on the third. But since those first few, I believe I’ve improved at dropping in when touchy topics arise and proclaiming without fear the key points of the book.

As for the book itself, I can’t wait to get it into your hands. The publication date will be announced very soon. Consider these podcasts a teaser of what five years of research into the history of media distortion and propaganda have taught me. Our media system is deceptive, and it’s a huge problem as we live through elections, pandemics, and wars, but we’re also living in a time with a New Enlightenment dawning around us. We can know more of the truth about world events than any humans living before us—if we build the media consciousness to navigate the news and penetrate the censorship plaguing social media.

The diverse range of shows that have hosted me means you probably get to choose an interview hosted by someone with whom you agree (although I always recommend a Balanced Media Diet). I’ve been interviewed by left-leaning hosts (Tarabuster, Dig on America), right-leaning hosts (Deprogram, Grimerica), hosts seeking concealed truths (Unbridled Minds, Forbidden Knowledge News) and hosts just wanting to interview interesting people (Ripple Effect).

I’ve listed each show below with a snippet of its self-description and a brief summary of how I think it went, so you can choose your own adventure. I find each one listed here to be worthwhile, but if you want to listen to just one, I’d recommend Unbridled Minds or The Ripple Effect.

A quick test to understand your viewpoint in today’s bizarre political media landscape.

It was a political year in which up was often down, and right masqueraded frequently as left. The year 2016 then wrapped up with a steady stream of diametrically opposed media stories all clamoring for recognition as “the truth.”

The mainstream media featured incessant talk of “fake news,” and pundits propounded conspiracy theories about Russians hacking email servers. The independent media continued to analyze piles of evidence showing collusion on the part of the mainstream media and the two political parties who ran the worst presidential campaign in modern American politics.

With all this news and theory swirling around, some of which must be false, it has become difficult to know at any one time whether you’re reading the news correctly, whether you’re seeing the role of the media itself clearly, or whether there’s a Matrix-like veil obscuring your comprehension of national events.

Here’s a quick test to determine whether

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Take a trip to the Middle Kingdom,” opens a short feature review of Double Happiness in the East Bay’s Alameda Magazine.

Go to China “with Tony Brasunas as your guide, in this memoir-travel tome about his experience as a 22-year-old teaching English to ninth-graders at Peizheng High School. Brasunas is there in 1997, before the interconnectedness of the Internet, when ‘the motives of Americans in particular were suspect.'”

“The delightful chapters read like short stories.”

Read the full review: Tony Brasunas Finds Happiness in China

The review closes:

Brasunas pulls it all together for a retrospective that deftly and lovingly depicts the country responsible for his spiritual awakening.

Maggie Sharpe, a journalist for the Bay Area News Group, interviewed me for a feature piece in the San Jose Mercury-News. After asking me a dozen rather harrowing and open-ended questions, she told me to be patient.

A week later, I discovered that she put together a marvelous piece. I don’t know quite what to say. I have to admit it’s the article I imagined someone would write about the book someday.

Read it here: Author to talk about life-changing time in China

The piece appeared shortly before my event at the Alameda library, and I believe it brought out quite a few extra readers, travelers, and curious armchair adventurers.

Ms. Sharpe begins the piece:

When Tony Brasunas left U.S. soil for the first time to teach English in China, he had no idea what a life-altering experience it would be — nor that 15 years later, he would write a book about his teaching, traveling and the transformation he experienced.

She describes the time I fell miserably ill, exploring the niceties of that near-death experience, and digs deeper into what illness meant for my time in China.

Brasunas said that even negative experiences such as getting sick, getting ripped off at the markets and even being ignored or ridiculed by some of his students only increased his learning.

“I followed the thread of my instincts to what I wanted and to who I am,” said Brasunas. “This led me often to experience even ostensibly negative things in a positive light — that the negative moments and the positive moments were both a part of the magic of learning and of life.”

My gratitude to the newspapers that ran this piece (the Contra Costa Times and Alameda Journal also ran the feature), and, above all, to Maggie Sharpe for her excellent questions and even better writing.