A review by dwdillydally
Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II by Daniel James Brown

challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

3.75

TLDR: Essential reading! Even if you think you already known about soldiers in World War 2. This is both heartbreaking and hopeful. 

This is the second book I've read by Daniel James Brown. He is excellent about following people from the beginning of the book to the end. In this case, several men's paths through many of the same tumultuous, historic events in just a few years...
  • the attack on Pearl Harbor and the bigoted backlash
  • being sent to Japanese internment camps
  • recruitment (or draft) into the army
  • deployment to Italy and fighting high casualty battles
  • liberating Nazi death camps
  • eventually returning to their home country where citizens were still suspicious, the government and still imprisoned their extended families, and businesses discriminated against them

The books contains many photos sprinkled through all the chapters, which help readers track the stories of each man. I appreciated that these photos were not jammed together in the middle pages where a reader usually has to flip back and forth to while reading. These photos were in the same chapters as the text I was reading. This simple formatting was convenient and needs to be done is many more history books.  

I was most fascinated by the chapters where Japanese-American and Hawaiian recruits were sent to basic training in Mississippi, their deep cultural differences, and the empathy they discovered after several grueling months training together. 

I struggled in the chapters about the 442nds battles in Italy and southern France. I could not keep track of the battalions, regiments, and topography in my head. So, I requested a physical copy of this book (which contains a few simple illustrated maps) as always the more comprehensive National Geographic's "Atlas of World War II"

There was a missed opportunity to go more indepth with how the USA decommissioned the interment camps and compare it with the chaos of how the Nazi death camps ended. There are parallels and divergences that Brown had led up to, but didn't take the chance / have the time to explore. Or perhaps he did, but then it was taken out during the editing process? 
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