David Neiwert's new book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community is finally out and I've ordered my copy. David has been working on this book for about thirteen years and the research he did formed the basis of his excellent repudiation of Malkin's pro-internment revisionism.
The flyleaf blurb describes the book this way:
Strawberry Days tells the vivid and moving tale of the creation and destruction of a Japanese immigrant community. Before World War II, Bellevue, the now-booming "edge city" on the outskirts of Seattle, was a prosperous farm town renowned for its strawberries. Many of its farmers were recent Japanese immigrants who, despite being rejected by white society, were able to make a living cultivating the rich soil. Yet the lives they created for themselves through years of hard work vanished almost instantly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. David Neiwert combines compelling story-telling with first-hand interviews and newly uncovered documents to weave together the history of this community and the racist schemes that prevented the immigrants from reclaiming their land after the war. Ultimately, Strawberry Days represents more than one community’s story, reminding us that bigotry's roots are deeply entwined in the very fiber of American society.
David says the book includes an epilogue specifically addressing Malkin's claims.
By the way, Strawberry Days is now number 1,416 at Amazon while Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror is now at 15,319. I'm sure we can drive David even higher than that. After you buy and read your own copy, get another copy and donate to a local high-school library.
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