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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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