Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalls her childhood at a Japanese incarceration camp in this engrossing memoir that has become a staple of curriculum in schools and on campuses across the country. This special 50th-anniversary edition features a new cover, a foreword by New York Times bestselling and acclaimed author Traci Chee, and photographs of life at the camp by Toyo Miyatake.

During World War II the incarceration camp called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose? To house thousands of Japanese Americans.

In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalls life at Manzanar through the eyes of the child she was and the experiences of her family. She relays the mundane and remarkable details of daily life during an extraordinary period of American history: The wartime imprisonment of civilians, most native-born Americans, in their own country, without trial, and by their fellow Americans.

She tells of her fear, confusion, and bewilderment as well as the dignity and resourcefulness of people in oppressive and demeaning circumstances. Jeanne delivers a powerful first-person account that reveals her search for the meaning of Manzanar.

Continental Drift, Loving Life, The Last Paradise--which won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Novel Award in 1999--and White Mountain Passage are among James D. Houston's seven novels. Californians and Goodbye to Manzanar, which he coauthored with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, are two of his nonfiction works. He has received the Humanities Award, an NEA writing fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation residency. He was a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He resides in Santa Cruz, California.