Most Popular Books by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

A true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War internment.

Traces the life of Sayo, born under the disastrous sign of the Fire Horse, who comes to America for an arranged marriage and years later is imprisoned with her family in a Japanese internment camp during World War II.

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.

A Vietnam veteran discusses his support of a 250-bed orphanage during his two tours of duty in Vietnam, describing the plight of the children and the sometimes illicit operations he used to sustain the orphanage