Scan barcode
A review by juliana_aldous
Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II by Daniel James Brown
5.0
I walked into my local library in Little Boston and as I was checking out the librarian asked if I had read enough books over the summer to qualify for the adult summer reading program.
Hell yeah, you bet I read enough.
I was awarded the choice of picking a free book and I chose Daniel James Brown's book Facing the Mountain: A True Story of American Heroes in the World. I'm so glad to have stumbled upon this excellent book about the Japanese American internment camps and the young men who despite all the hate thrown at them showed up and punched the Nazis and helped liberate Europe.
The sadness in reading this book is the realization of how far we have not come on our own soil.
In the epilogue, Brown quoted a letter from Truman to Eleanor Roosevelt about attacks against returning Japanese American families to their communities, "These disgraceful actions almost make you believe that a lot of our Americans have a streak of Nazi in them."
I like to hold on to this quote from the author also in the epilogue, "In the end, they helped us win for us a far better world than the one in which they found themselves when Japanese bombers first appeared over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. Now, more than a generation later, it is up to us to cherish and protect what they won, to devote ourselves yet again to the principles they defended, to surmount our own mountains of trouble, to keep moving upward together on the long slope of our shared destiny."
Hell yeah, you bet I read enough.
I was awarded the choice of picking a free book and I chose Daniel James Brown's book Facing the Mountain: A True Story of American Heroes in the World. I'm so glad to have stumbled upon this excellent book about the Japanese American internment camps and the young men who despite all the hate thrown at them showed up and punched the Nazis and helped liberate Europe.
The sadness in reading this book is the realization of how far we have not come on our own soil.
In the epilogue, Brown quoted a letter from Truman to Eleanor Roosevelt about attacks against returning Japanese American families to their communities, "These disgraceful actions almost make you believe that a lot of our Americans have a streak of Nazi in them."
I like to hold on to this quote from the author also in the epilogue, "In the end, they helped us win for us a far better world than the one in which they found themselves when Japanese bombers first appeared over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. Now, more than a generation later, it is up to us to cherish and protect what they won, to devote ourselves yet again to the principles they defended, to surmount our own mountains of trouble, to keep moving upward together on the long slope of our shared destiny."