In a more scholarly appraisal, Anthony Friedson delineates the Houstons' reflective book on three levels: first, an overview of war hysteria; second, an episode in American assimilation; third, a coming-of-age narrative focusing on Jeanne's growing-up years. Produced to fill a void, the book, intended as polemic, or aggressive statement of opinion, on a controversial issue, authenticates a significant page in America's history, a confrontation with the bedrock issues of freedoms as old as the Magna Carta and guaranteed in the Constitution. Because no previous work dealt so intimately with the denial of freedoms to Asian Americans, the Houstons' research lays the groundwork for more scholarship and narrative as a means to greater understanding of racism.
Not only does the work illuminate the political maneuverings which cost 120,000 innocent people over three years of unconstitutional incarceration, it also details the social mechanisms by which people cope with arbitrary uprooting, loss, privation, and national embarrassment. Told in readable, accessible form, the book skirts a more academic approach by relying on first-person narration from a child's perspective. Chronologically, the work concludes, not with the closing of the internment camp, but with the marriage of Jeanne to a Caucasian. In a healing, unifying return to Manzanar, the speaker creates a conciliatory tone, a method of ridding herself of lingering regrets and bitterness and of assisting her race and her nation to reflect on an episode as shattering and dismaying as the massacre at Wounded Knee, the Salem witch trials, Nat Turner's rebellion, John Brown's hanging, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Watts, Attica Prison, and Los Angeles riots, the exploitation of coolie labor to build the transcontinental railroad, or the My Lai massacre.
