The evacuation from their homes and relocation to internment camps of Japanese-Americans during WW II had, Smith (Rediscovering Christianity, 1994, etc.) contends, at least one positive result: by toppling the existing immigrant social structure and changing the course of lives, it sped up the process of assimilation. Smith's history of Japanese immigration to the US is excellent and includes ample insight into Japanese society and conditions and that country's relations with the West. He also provides a clear backdrop to the tangled chain of events that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor. The evacuation became ``The Decision Nobody Made'': He finds a measure of blame at every level of government from President Roosevelt to Congress (``A Jap is a Jap anywhere you find him,'' said one senator) to J. Edgar Hoover and Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command. There were those opposed, including Attorney General Francis Biddle, who was ``almost fanatical'' in trying to resist any infringement of civil rights. Smith gets a little top-heavy with statistics, at times; but the numbers often drive home a point: of the 110,000 forced from their homes, 72,000 were Nisei, second-generation Japanese born in the US and, therefore, citizens. The book is best when Smith looks at the evacuation's impact on personal lives, such as that of Mary Masuda, whose brother, killed in action, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Others, like WW I veteran Joe Kurihari, arrested for leading a rebellion at the camp at Manzanar in California, became embittered. Still others look at the disruption in their lives in a positive light: The ``suffering bore fruit,'' says Yosishada Kawai. ``We stood up with hope and courage [and built] the foundation for the future life of the Japanese people on this North American soil.'' Covers well-trod ground, but succeeds in bringing a personal dimensionof both victims and perpetratorsto the historical record.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80354-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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