10 books about the internment of Japanese-Americans

A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE • Bestselling author Richard Reeves provides an authoritative account of the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese aliens during World War II “Highly readable . . . [A] vivid and instructive reminder of what war and fear can do to civilized people.” —Evan Thomas, The New York Times Book Review After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that forced more than 120,000 Japanese Americans into primitive camps for the rest of war. Their only crime: looking like the enemy. In Infamy, acclaimed historian Richard Reeves delivers a sweeping narrative of this atrocity. Men we usually consider heroes—FDR, Earl Warren, Edward R. Murrow—were in this case villains. We also learn of internees who joined the military to fight for the country that had imprisoned their families, even as others fought for their rights all the way to the Supreme Court. The heart of the book, however, tells the poignant stories of those who endured years in “war relocation camps,” many of whom suffered this injustice with remarkable grace. Racism and war hysteria led to one of the darkest episodes in American history. But by recovering the past, Infamy has given voice to those who ultimately helped the nation better understand the true meaning of patriotism.

An instant New York Times bestseller! "Internment sets itself apart...terrifying, thrilling and urgent."--Entertainment Weekly Rebellions are built on hope. Set in a horrifying near-future United States, seventeen-year-old Layla Amin and her parents are forced into an internment camp for Muslim American citizens. With the help of newly made friends also trapped within the internment camp, her boyfriend on the outside, and an unexpected alliance, Layla begins a journey to fight for freedom, leading a revolution against the camp's Director and his guards. Heart-racing and emotional, Internment challenges readers to fight complicit silence that exists in our society today.

A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love. George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. What is American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.

"Imagine you learn that there are kids your age living in a prison with their families. None of them have done anything wrong. It is racial prejudice and fear that has put these people there. Then imagine that your family volunteers to live in one of these places to help the people who are imprisoned. That is what twelve-year-old Helen Hannan experiences in 1945. She hears about these prisons before most other Americans do. Traveling to a place called Camp Amache with her brother, sister and parents, she quickly discovers this is no summer camp. The families at Amache are living in crowded, cold barracks, behind barbed wire fences, with armed guards watching them from towers. Helen learns to cope with this. She experiences the cost of racial prejudice. She struggles to understand how some people can hurt others so badly. But she also makes many friends, and learns that everyone loves French fries! Most importantly, Helen sees first hand how vital it is to act on your beliefs."--Back cover.

"When Mary Matsuda Gruenewald was seventeen years old she and her family were evacuated to an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, along with nearly 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. She tells her story of imprisonment from the heart and mind of a woman now eighty years old who experienced the challenges and wounds of internment at a crucial point in her young life. She captures the emotional and psychological essence of growing up in the midst of this profound dislocation and injustice. No longer willing to stay within what she describes as "the self-imposed barbed-wire fences built around my experiences in the camps," Gruenewald breaks her silence as a Nisei with the publication of her first book."--BOOK JACKET.

On December 7, 1941, thirteen-year old Alice's life changes completely as she experiences an act of war, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and her father's imprisonment in a Japanese internment camp, leaving Alice and the rest of her family struggling to adjust to life without him.

In World War II much of Asia fell under Japanese control after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. All non-Asians were imprisoned in concentration camps until August of 1945, the end of the war in the Pacific. This is the story of a Dutch family, resident in the Dutch East Indies, that fell victim to the Japanese occupation and was interned in jungle camps throughout the war. It tells the journey from riches to rags, from fear and suffering, to the joy of freedom and recovery.