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Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

James D. Houston

Farewell to Manzanar Hardcover – April 29, 2002

by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston (Author), James D. Houston (Author)

1,193 ratings

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During World War II a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew. For her father it was essentially the end of his life.

At age thirty-seven, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalls life at Manzanar through the eyes of the child she was. She tells of her fear, confusion, and bewilderment as well as the dignity and great resourcefulness of people in oppressive and demeaning circumstances. Written with her husband, Jeanne delivers a powerful first-person account that reveals her search for the meaning of Manzanar.

Farewell to Manzanar has become a staple of curriculum in schools and on campuses across the country. Last year the San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the twentieth century’s 100 best nonfiction books from west of the Rockies.

Reading age

10 - 12 years
Print length

208 pages
Language

English
Grade level

5 - 7
Lexile measure

1040L
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.76 x 8.25 inches
Publisher

HMH Books for Young Readers
Publication date

April 29, 2002
ISBN-10

9780618216208
ISBN-13

978-0618216208
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A poignant memoir from a Japanese American. . . . Told without bitterness, her story reflects the triumph of the human spirit during an extraordinary episode in American history."
—Library Journal

"[Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston] describes vividly the life in the camp and the humiliations suffered by the detainees... A sober and moving personal account."
—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston was born in Inglewood, California, in 1934. She studied sociology and journalism at San Jose State University, where she met her husband and cowriter of her memoir Farewell to Manzanar, James D. Houston. For their teleplay for the NBC television drama based on Farewell to Manzanar, they received the prestigious Humanitas Prize. Jeanne’s widely anthologized essays and short stories were first collected in Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian American Womanhood. Her works have earned numerous honors, including a United States-Japan Cultural Exchange Fellowship; a Rockefeller Foundation residence at Bellagio, Italy; and a 1984 Wonder Woman Award, given to women over forty who have made outstanding achievements in pursuit of truth and positive social change.

James D. Houston (1933–2009) was the author of several novels and nonfiction works exploring the history and cultures of the western United States and the Asia/Pacific region. His works include Snow Mountain Passage, Continental Drift, In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey, and The Last Paradise, which received a 1999 American Book Award for fiction. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Jim received a National Endowment for the Arts writing grant, a Library of Congress Story Award, and traveled to Asia lecturing for the U.S.I.S. Arts America program.

Product details

ASIN : 0618216200
Publisher : HMH Books for Young Readers (April 29, 2002)
Language : English
Hardcover : 208 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780618216208
ISBN-13 : 978-0618216208
Reading age : 10 - 12 years
Lexile measure : 1040L
Grade level : 5 - 7
Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.76 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #228,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #100 in Japanese Biographies
- #197 in Children's Military Books
- #273 in Children's Asian & Asian American Books

Customer Reviews:
1,193 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		75%
4 star		15%
3 star		6%
2 star		1%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Jennifer S Dickerson

WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2017

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WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS! I am eleven years old and I read this book for summer reading. I am an advanced reader but it was very confusing because the times and years kept bouncing around. It is a true story mainly about a girl, who is the youngest of ten, from a Japanese- American family during World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, they're sent to an internment camp. SPOILER ALERT! Her dad is sent to jail for allegedly sending oil to Japan. In the beginning of the story, Jeanne is seven years old , but she is about 35 at the end. The story is set in the internment camp, middle school, high school, and home. It is a very sad book, but also happy. When I finished the book, I was both sad and confused. I give this book three stars because the book was kind of interesting but confusing at the same time. If I could change anything, I would put the story actually in chronological order, instead of the storyline bouncing around. My favorite part was the end when Jeanne comes back to the internment camp with her kids years later and she looks around, remembering funny and sad memories. It was the most emotional part of the story. I would recommend this book to teens and adults.

39 people found this helpful

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Meadowlands

Informative, touching, and powerful

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2017

Verified Purchase

A personal account of how devastating it was for Japanese-Americans to be rounded up and interned during WWII. Previously I had only a vague notion of the facts. Reading this book was like living the fear, shame, and deprivation right along with the Wakatsuki family. After Pearl Harbor, when a new Federal policy labeled Japanese-Americans as undesirables and exiled them to remote desert camps, the plucky Wakatsukis, and over a hundred thousand more like them, struggled daily to preserve their family life and their self-respect despite degrading conditions and helpless dependence on handouts. As the war drew to a close the camps were shut down, but their effects on the interned Japanese-Americans were lifelong and reached into the next generation. This small but powerful book is a page-turner.

23 people found this helpful

Helpful

Insightful and Beautifully Written Memoir

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2014

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The WWII Japanese Internment camps represent a sad, embarrassing chapter in American history, which is probably why I never read about it during my time in school. Over 110,000 Japanese people were forcibly sent to 1 of 10 camps throughout the West. The majority of the internees were actually U.S. citizens, some 2nd or 3rd generation. The author was only 7 when her family was bused from Los Angeles to Manzanar in a remote corner of the Eastern Sierra between Mt. Whitney and Death Valley. The camp wasn't even completed yet when the first internees arrived. Families were assigned half of a flimsy barracks building with no walls for privacy. They ate communal meals and used communal toilets.

The climate was hostile, with heavy winds howling down off of the mountains kicking up dust constantly. The cold winter weather penetrated the thin tar-papered walls of the barracks buildings. In spite of the remote, hostile environment, the inhabitants worked to make their temporary home more comfortable, by decorating and building partitions. They cultivated vegetable gardens and harvested fruit from the orchards. Kids went to school; babies were conceived and born at the camp. In short, life went on. However, the camp life lead to an inevitable deterioration in the family structure. Meals were communal rather than family events, and parents had no way of providing for their families in the traditional method. Jeanne's father had a very difficult time in camp, and deteriorated into alcoholism. As she wrote in the book though her life started in camp, her father's life ended there. He never recovered his fishing business or his sense of self worth.

The book provides an insightful glimpse into the daily life in the camps as well as the emotional and economic toll extracted from the inhabitants. They lost their businesses, their homes, their way of life and their dignity. In a sad commentary on the personal havoc wreaked by the camps, the author noted that the last to leave were the elderly people; they had nothing to return to, and no energy or confidence to go back into their old communities and rebuild so they hung onto camp life until forced to leave.

I had the opportunity to visit the desolate, remote Manzanar camp in 2012. Only a couple of barracks are left, but there is an excellent visitor center that faithfully recreates what it must have been to live there. You can drive around the roads and see how large the camp was. The magnificent mountain range looms large on the horizon, with tantalizing beauty and freedom, which was denied to those inside the barbed wire fences.

Farewell to Manzanar is a beautifully written important memoir since there is so little written about that time. Pay no attention to the number of 1 and 2-star reviews. It appears that most of those are written by school age children who were forced to read the book and do a review, and probably didn't appreciate the cultural significance of the internment camps.

51 people found this helpful

Helpful

KauiTop Contributor: Historical Fiction Books

Worth the time to read and reflect upon the author's journey

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

I read this book with my three boys (ages 13 and a pair of 12 year old twins) as an adjunct to Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I read Diary of a Young Girl as a pre-read for the twins' 7th grade literature assignments coming up this school year. The book was dreaded by the boys but ended up being "not so bad." As an additional perspective on WWII, following the recommendation of the twins' academic counselor, we read this book, which was very good and a bit more relevant to half-Chinese kids growing up in California.

Farewell to Manzanar is a memoir, written by a woman who was 7 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. She is a Nissei, which is a first-generation Japanese; her father left Japan as a young man to try his luck in the U.S. The story starts with her memories of December 7, 1941, and moves through the multiple relocations and forced evacuations and mysterious arrest and imprisonment of her father. She describes Camp Manzanar, and reflects poignantly about her father's emotional challenges and her own struggle with racial and cultural duality.

This is a lovely, low-commitment read which lends touching insight not only into the terrible way Japanese-American civilians were treated by the American government, but also, more broadly, the challenges I believe all Asian cultures face - the dilemma of assimilation v. individual rights. Racial bias exists in the oddest places and often, when encountered, is either innocuous or ridiculous enough to warrant disbelief, dismissal. However, the stain of personal shame is unavoidable in all of these situations, and Farewell to Manzanar eloquently depicts this exquisite conundrum.

21 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

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Fred

it was honestly different story than that its tite, ...

Reviewed in Canada on November 17, 2015

Verified Purchase

it was honestly different story than that its tite, it was a life story of a very ordinary family, who stayed in camp for 4 years. it wad nothing historically attractive to learn. in general it was a memoir of apoerson who remember nothing for the time she stayed Manzanar. title of the book confuses about its content, but there is really nothing to read, most of the book is about the type.and colour of the cloths they wore, i dont revommend it if you are looking for a histotical book.....

One person found this helpful

無論

新たな認識

Reviewed in Japan on November 30, 2013

Verified Purchase

最近アジアもきな臭い。海外で活躍する日系の助けも必要だとの記事も散見されるようになった。
日本を出たことがない私が、たまたま出会った本であるが、彼らの助けを得るためには日本にいる我々もより一層襟をただして行く事が大事だと認識した。出なければ、海外の方々の生活も壊れるのだから。

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