Ebook Farewell to Manzanar Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston James D Houston Books

Product details Age Range 12 and up Grade Level 7 - 9 Paperback 208 pages Publisher Young Readers Paperback; Reprint edition (July 11, 2017) Language English ISBN-10 1328742113

Farewell to Manzanar Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston James D Houston Books Reviews

• The WWII Japanese Internment camps represent a sad, embarrassing chapter in American history, which is probably why I never read about it during my time in school. Over 110,000 Japanese people were forcibly sent to 1 of 10 camps throughout the West. The majority of the internees were actually U.S. citizens, some 2nd or 3rd generation. The author was only 7 when her family was bused from Los Angeles to Manzanar in a remote corner of the Eastern Sierra between Mt. Whitney and Death Valley. The camp wasn't even completed yet when the first internees arrived. Families were assigned half of a flimsy barracks building with no walls for privacy. They ate communal meals and used communal toilets.
  
  The climate was hostile, with heavy winds howling down off of the mountains kicking up dust constantly. The cold winter weather penetrated the thin tar-papered walls of the barracks buildings. In spite of the remote, hostile environment, the inhabitants worked to make their temporary home more comfortable, by decorating and building partitions. They cultivated vegetable gardens and harvested fruit from the orchards. Kids went to school; babies were conceived and born at the camp. In short, life went on. However, the camp life lead to an inevitable deterioration in the family structure. Meals were communal rather than family events, and parents had no way of providing for their families in the traditional method. Jeanne's father had a very difficult time in camp, and deteriorated into alcoholism. As she wrote in the book though her life started in camp, her father's life ended there. He never recovered his fishing business or his sense of self worth.
  
  The book provides an insightful glimpse into the daily life in the camps as well as the emotional and economic toll extracted from the inhabitants. They lost their businesses, their homes, their way of life and their dignity. In a sad commentary on the personal havoc wreaked by the camps, the author noted that the last to leave were the elderly people; they had nothing to return to, and no energy or confidence to go back into their old communities and rebuild so they hung onto camp life until forced to leave.
  
  I had the opportunity to visit the desolate, remote Manzanar camp in 2012. Only a couple of barracks are left, but there is an excellent visitor center that faithfully recreates what it must have been to live there. You can drive around the roads and see how large the camp was. The magnificent mountain range looms large on the horizon, with tantalizing beauty and freedom, which was denied to those inside the barbed wire fences.
  
  Farewell to Manzanar is a beautifully written important memoir since there is so little written about that time. Pay no attention to the number of 1 and 2-star reviews. It appears that most of those are written by school age children who were forced to read the book and do a review, and probably didn't appreciate the cultural significance of the internment camps.
• A personal account of how devastating it was for Japanese-Americans to be rounded up and interned during WWII. Previously I had only a vague notion of the facts. Reading this book was like living the fear, shame, and deprivation right along with the Wakatsuki family. After Pearl Harbor, when a new Federal policy labeled Japanese-Americans as undesirables and exiled them to remote desert camps, the plucky Wakatsukis, and over a hundred thousand more like them, struggled daily to preserve their family life and their self-respect despite degrading conditions and helpless dependence on handouts. As the war drew to a close the camps were shut down, but their effects on the interned Japanese-Americans were lifelong and reached into the next generation. This small but powerful book is a page-turner.
• I read this book with my three boys (ages 13 and a pair of 12 year old twins) as an adjunct to Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I read Diary of a Young Girl as a pre-read for the twins' 7th grade literature assignments coming up this school year. The book was dreaded by the boys but ended up being "not so bad." As an additional perspective on WWII, following the recommendation of the twins' academic counselor, we read this book, which was very good and a bit more relevant to half-Chinese kids growing up in California.
  
  Farewell to Manzanar is a memoir, written by a woman who was 7 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. She is a Nissei, which is a first-generation Japanese; her father left Japan as a young man to try his luck in the U.S. The story starts with her memories of December 7, 1941, and moves through the multiple relocations and forced evacuations and mysterious arrest and imprisonment of her father. She describes Camp Manzanar, and reflects poignantly about her father's emotional challenges and her own struggle with racial and cultural duality.
  
  This is a lovely, low-commitment read which lends touching insight not only into the terrible way Japanese-American civilians were treated by the American government, but also, more broadly, the challenges I believe all Asian cultures face - the dilemma of assimilation v. individual rights. Racial bias exists in the oddest places and often, when encountered, is either innocuous or ridiculous enough to warrant disbelief, dismissal. However, the stain of personal shame is unavoidable in all of these situations, and Farewell to Manzanar eloquently depicts this exquisite conundrum.
• WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS! I am eleven years old and I read this book for summer reading. I am an advanced reader but it was very confusing because the times and years kept bouncing around. It is a true story mainly about a girl, who is the youngest of ten, from a Japanese- American family during World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, they're sent to an internment camp. SPOILER ALERT! Her dad is sent to jail for allegedly sending oil to Japan. In the beginning of the story, Jeanne is seven years old , but she is about 35 at the end. The story is set in the internment camp, middle school, high school, and home. It is a very sad book, but also happy. When I finished the book, I was both sad and confused. I give this book three stars because the book was kind of interesting but confusing at the same time. If I could change anything, I would put the story actually in chronological order, instead of the storyline bouncing around. My favorite part was the end when Jeanne comes back to the internment camp with her kids years later and she looks around, remembering funny and sad memories. It was the most emotional part of the story. I would recommend this book to teens and adults.