In a straightforward, nonfiction memoir, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and her husband, James D. Houston, recount the Wakatsuki family's internment at Manzanar War Relocation Center, one of ten concentration camps devised by President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 following the Japanese surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. To some readers, the book is an introduction to a thorny era in their country's history, a time of deprivation of rights without due process for 120,000 Japanese Americans. Jeanne's reliving of intimate, painful details provides what no historical account can—a view of life for 30,000 Asian Americans in a stark, concentration-camp atmosphere on the rim of California's Mojave Desert. The factual narrative follows her through three decades of silent denial to adulthood, when she is, at last, able to reveal the misery, the degradation of her family and race, and exorcise Manzanar with an act of public enlightenment.
