Manzanar - Hardcover

YA-- Young adults studying the political and social history of the U.S. need to know about its more shameful aspects. Manzanar portrays one of these: the internments of Japanese-Americans during World War II. John Hersey's lengthy essay, "A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportions," opens this description of the largest of the detainment camps, Manzanar. His clear and complete description of the political and historical circumstances surrounding the internments and the hysteria and prejudice that prompted them is interspersed with Adams' photographs, which provide a record of the camp that words cannot, a feeling of what life there was like that the text rarely offers. The faces of the internees make more obvious the contrast between the prejudice against the Japanese-Americans and the individual realities. The chapters by Wright and Armor offer a portrayal of the response of internees to their imprisonment. The book also addresses the aftermath of detainment: the return home to stolen possessions and lost homes; the legal battles (some still being deliberated); and the bill to pay some reparation, made law in 1988. Other accounts, notably Farewell to Manzanar (Bantam, 1974) by Jeannie Wakatsuki Houston, personalize Manzanar's history.
- Sally Bates, Houston Public Library
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Armor, Wright, and Hersey vividly describe the disgraceful relocation of Japanese Americans in World War II. Specific attention to Manzanar, the first camp, appears in the form of 100 photographs taken by Ansel Adams in 1943. The pictures hint at suffering but more clearly reveal Americans who maintained their dignity and patriotism during harsh trial. Some of the pictures (not all were available for review) appeared in Adams's Born Free and Equal (1944), now rare. Other works deal more completely with the relocation experience and camp life (e.g., Jeanne W. and James D. Houston's Farewell to Manzanar, 1973), but Manzanar would be valuable in American and Japanese studies collections that lack Born Free and Equal . Kenneth W. Berger, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.