ipl-logo

Farewell To Manzanar Book Report

588 Words3 Pages

Ricky Mendoza
History 1302-3A1
Ms. Celeste
October 24, 2017
Manzanar Book Critique
“The name Manzanar meant nothing to us when we left Boyle Heights. We went because the government ordered us to”(15). The book Farewell to Manzanar has received the prestigious Humanitas Prize. The author of the book, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, has also written essays and short stories that were collected to help contribute in Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian American Womanhood. Farewell to Manzanar is a non-fiction book written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. The book is a powerful true story of Jeanne and her family’s life before, during, and after being inside a Japanese American internment camp. Most of the setting in this book takes place during World War Ⅱ. Jeanne tells of her and her family’s hardships and struggles in adjusting their life in cramped barracks, and searching for purpose in the internment camp.
Jeanne, being the narrator and author of this book, took an unemotional and observational take to describe her events in this book because she wanted to keep the factual accounts separate from her emotions and to show people the impact of Pearl Harbor had on …show more content…

“I smiled and sat down, suddenly aware of what being of Japanese ancestry was going to be like. I wouldn’t be faced with physical attack, or with overt shows of hatred”(141). In saying this phrase Jeanne finally realizes what prejudice really is and that hatred isn’t what she imagined it to be. It is more subtle in everyday interactions. She also makes a self-discovery about herself and how the camp really affected her life by being somewhat in her identity the next time she visits Manzanar with her children. “Until this trip I had not been able to admit that my own life really began

Show More
Related
210 Words | 1 Pages

Jeanne Wakatsuki, co-author of Farewell to Manzanar, is a Japanese American that was forced into an internment camp in 1941. Wakatsuki was born to two Japanese natives in Inglewood, California in 1934. Her childhood was stable, and she was surrounded by a large family consisting of nine siblings, four brothers and five sisters. When Wakatsuki was seven years old, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt ordered that all Japanese Americans be placed into federal custody. The Wakatsuki family was one of the first Japanese American families to be questioned about the Pearl Harbor tragedy because the federal government believed that all Japanese Americans were in cahoots with the Japanese military.

Read More
1028 Words | 5 Pages

This book reflects the author’s wish of not only remembering what has happened to the Japanese families living in the United States of America at the time of war but also to show its effects and how families made through that storm of problems and insecurities. The story takes in the first turn when the father of Jeanne gets arrested in the accusation of supplying fuel to Japanese parties and takes it last turn when after the passage of several years, Jeanne (writer) is living a contented life with her family and ponders over her past (Wakatsuki Houston and D. Houston 3-78). As we read along the pages

Read More
232 Words | 1 Pages

Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine is a story about a Japanese-American family and their experience in an internment camp in Utah. In the book, the young girl says to her mother “Is there anything wrong with my face?... People were staring” (15). The reader can see from this quote what it was like for the Japanese-Americans during the war. The quote shows how it was not just a national problem; it was a problem for everyone- including making a ten year old girl feel self-conscious.

Read More
1284 Words | 6 Pages

Mary Matsuda Gruenewald tells her tale of what life was like for her family when they were sent to internment camps in her memoir “Looking like the Enemy.” The book starts when Gruenewald is sixteen years old and her family just got news that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japan. After the bombing Gruenewald and her family life changed, they were forced to leave their home and go to internment camps meant for Japanese Americans. During the time Gruenewald was in imprisonment she dealt with the struggle for survival both physical and mental. This affected Gruenewald great that she would say to herself “Am I Japanese?

Read More
286 Words | 2 Pages

Authors Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston wanted to write Farwell to Manzanar not to reiterate the injustices that were placed upon the Japanese population, but to share what it was like from the Japanese people and what all went on within the fences of the internment camps. At first they were told that the issue of the internment camps was a dead topic, but Jeanne and James wanted to share Jeanne’s families story to express the injustice in a different light. By telling the personal story of the Wakatsuki family in Manzanar, an internment camp, it put a face to the people who were trapped within the boundaries of the camp. Twenty-five years after her release from Manzanar, Jeanne was now able to talk about her time in the camp

Read More
1177 Words | 5 Pages

Here, Julie Otsuka shows how the family members' personality, way they treat others, and how they treat themselves change from the alienation and isolation they experience from close family friends all the way up to the United States government. The two children of the family are very young when they are sent to the internment camp and don’t fully understand what is happening. Once they are let out of the camp and they return home, all of their school friends start to ignore them. The children say that, “Not a single one of our old friends from beforeー friends who had once shouted ‘Your house

Read More
463 Words | 2 Pages

Jeanne wouldn’t of wanted to remember this part of her life, being unproud of it, especially growing up in a culture where you never forsaken your family. Your family is your biggest honor, never let your family down, it will ruin the name. Going through the stage of where she wasn’t in the camp anymore, but she wasn’t an adult. It was when she was in school and she had the nightmare of this beautiful girl in the room and everyone is acknowledging her while Jeanne is outside, watching from the window.

Read More
1199 Words | 5 Pages

On the other hand, Jeanne was not so lucky when it came to solving friendship problems. Instead of being able to accept her as a Japanese-American, Jeanne has to almost erase the whole Japanese side of herself just to be slightly liked. Instead of “Miss Hiroshima” she had somehow turned into “Miss America (Houston 147). Even

Read More
865 Words | 4 Pages

World War 2 was unpleasant because of how many deaths it caused. The devastating war-affected countries like the USA and Japan. In the memoir Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki, a Japanese-American, talks about her experiences at the internment camp during WWII. She and her family went through very rough times at Manzanar. After they were released, their family wasn’t the same.

Read More
772 Words | 4 Pages

How would you feel if your home country declared you an enemy because of your heritage and physical appearance, and then forced you to live in a fenced in facility, surrounded by barbed wire, similar to prison, for four years? On February 19, 1942, this exact event took place, and 110,000 to 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and into internment camps located around the country. In the novels When the Emperor was Divine, a fiction piece written by Julie Otsuka, and Farewell to Manzanar, a non-fictitious book written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, the authors describe the lives and struggles Japanese families faced while living in these places. Even though the two novels use different rhetorical strategies throughout the

Read More
1395 Words | 6 Pages

Jeanne believed that she could not write this book solely to retell the tale of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. Instead, she wrote Farewell to Manzanar to share her personal experience(s) during that particular period of time. Jeanne’s argument throughout the book was that America was destroying the Japanese’s integrity. During Jeanne’s middle school and high school years, she struggles to find acceptance from the parents of her friends and the schools themselves. These individuals are afraid of what they’ll look like being involved

Read More
1010 Words | 5 Pages

Matsuda’s memoir is based off of her and her family’s experiences in the Japanese-American internment camps. Matsuda reveals what it is like during World War II as a Japanese American, undergoing family life, emotional stress, long term effects of interment, and her patriotism and the sacrifices she had to make being in the internment camps. Everyone living in Western section of the United States; California, Oregon, of Japanese descent were moved to internment camps after the Pearl Harbor bombing including seventeen year old Mary Matsuda Gruenewald and her family. Matsuda and her family had barely any time to pack their bags to stay at the camps. Matsuda and her family faced certain challenges living in the internment camp.

Read More
1504 Words | 7 Pages

The novel focuses on coping with the death and horror of war. It also speaks volumes about the true nature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the never-ending struggle of dealing with it. In the

Read More
906 Words | 4 Pages

The young girl is prevented from entering the church where her grandmother has prayers. As a person from the old world, the young girl is not allowed to play with boys from the new world. On the other hand, “in response to executive order” by Dwight Okita is about Americans of Japanese origins that were supposed to report to relocation

Read More
366 Words | 2 Pages

During the Middle Age period, European painters depicted Madonna as a sacred, yet mystical mother whose modesty, in terms of behavior and dress, was flourishing throughout the whole composition. The idealized image of Madonna as such served as an icon for the Christian woman who was taught from very little that carnal desires are vices that are meant to be punished. According to Marilyn Yalom, the author of A History of the Breast, for the medieval woman the female breast, “had a singular importance: it was the sign of attachment between mother and child, the link from one generation to the next, with all that implied in terms of rank, wealth, and moral responsibilities” (36). As a consequence, the medieval mother did not even think of the

Read More

More about Farewell To Manzanar Book Report

Related Topics

Open Document