Well-written book about life in a Japanese internment camp and the social and political forces that allowed their...
In her debut, Grant (English/Penn State Univ.) teases out the story of her Japanese grandmother’s internment during World War II.
The author weaves rich supporting material throughout the narrative, providing a solid context for the relocation and internment of 112,000 Japanese throughout the West. For much of the book, Grant coaxes recollections from her grandmother Obaachan, “prying information from her that she prefers to keep herself.” After being wrenched from their San Francisco home shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Grant’s family was sent to a relocation camp in California, where her grandparents met and courted, walking the Pomona fairgrounds that served as their initial internment camp. Later relocated to Heart Mountain, Wyo., they continued their relationship, married and raised their first child. Grant offers a chronicle of daily life in the camps, with its unfamiliar American food, lack of privacy and modesty, baby gifts from the Quakers, intense cold and craft classes to help pass the time. The Japanese concept of shikataganai—surrendering to whatever fate lies ahead—pervaded the culture of the camps, fostering despair and listlessness. This is also the story of a young woman navigating her marriage to a strong but exacting personality and family ties weakened by the stress and separation of internment. Eventually the couple left Wyoming for a chance to work in a food-processing plant in New Jersey, where they settled in and quietly absorbed the shame of their incarceration.
Well-written book about life in a Japanese internment camp and the social and political forces that allowed their existence—though Obaachan’s reticence subdues the emotional intensity of the story.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-272-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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