Further Information
Books
Goldsmith, Connie.
Bombs over Bikini: The World’s First Nuclear Disaster.
Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2014.
Beginning in 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, the United States
started an extensive nuclear bomb-testing program in the Marshall Islands of
the South Pacific Ocean. Many islanders lost their ancestral home, while others
experienced significant radioactive fallout, as did the crew of a Japanese fishing
vessel in 1954.
Grady, Cynthia.
Write to Me: Letters from Japanese American Children to the Librarian
They Left Behind.
Illustrated by Amiko Hirao. Boston: Charlesbridge, 2018.
Intended for very young readers, this charming book describes how one librarian
asked her students who were to be incarcerated to write to her and share their
stories. The letters are part of the Japanese American National Museum.
Hirasuna, Delphine.
The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American
Internment Camps 1942–1946.
Photography by Terry Heffernan. Berkeley, CA:
Ten Speed, 2005.
Gaman
is a Japanese word for endurance with grace and dignity in the face of
what seems unbearable, an apt description of life in the internment camps. More
than 150 examples of some of the amazing art created in wood, fabric, yarn, and
other media shows the strength of the human experience.
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James D. Houston.
Farewell to Manzanar: The
Powerful True Story of Life inside a Japanese American Internment Camp.
New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
Perhaps one of the best-known internment memoirs, it tells the story of a fishing
family from Long Beach, California, that was incarcerated at Manzanar. The
FBI arrested the author’s father, leaving her mother to cope alone in the camp
with her children.
Kadohata, Cynthia.
Weedflower.
New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006.
This novel tells the story of twelve-year-old Sumiko. Raised on a California
flower farm, she was interned at the Poston camp in Arizona. Sumiko befriends
an Indian boy who is just as angry that the camp is on his land as she is horrified
to be a prisoner there. The story offers intriguing insights into life inside
the camp.
Marrin, Albert.
Uprooted: The Japanese American Experience during World War II.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
This nonfiction book for teens commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of
the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. It was a National Book Award finalist
and a Siebert Honor book. The author focuses on the history of racism in the
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