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.

Hersey calls it "the bitterest shame of the Second World War for the sweet land of liberty": the mass incarceration, on racial grounds and false evidence of military necessity, of an entire class of American citizens. Adams, then already an internationally known photographer, was invited by the camp director in 1943 to make a pictorial record of Manzanar, one of the two "relocation centers" in California where Japanese Americans were held throughout the war. The 100 photos reproduced here, his sole venture into the documentary field, are memorable for their straightforward depiction of the conditions under which the detainees lived out their spartan existence in stoic dignity. Written by Armor, an attorney, and Associate Press photo-editor Wright, the text, a brief but eloquent account of an unprecedented American social crime, includes the later stories of individuals who served time at Manzanar: a Cub Scout who went on to become a member of congress, another boy who would become a disabled U.S. Navy veteran, a young woman who became a doctor. On August 10, 1988, President Reagan signed legislation offering $20,000 in reparations to each survivor of the camps: "We gather here today to right a grave wrong." First serial to the New York Times; BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.