Life after Manzanar

Life After Manzanar by by Naomi Hirahara (Author), Heather C. Lindquist (Author), Art Hansen (Foreword)

From the editor of the award-winning Children of Manzanar, Heather C. Lindquist, and Edgar Award winner Naomi Hirahara comes a nuanced account of the “Resettlement”: the relatively unexamined period when ordinary people of Japanese ancestry, having been unjustly imprisoned during World War II, were finally released from custody. Given twenty-five dollars and a one-way bus ticket to make a new life, some ventured east to Denver and Chicago to start over, while others returned to Southern California only to face discrimination and an alarming scarcity of housing and jobs.

Hirahara and Lindquist weave new and archival oral histories into an engaging narrative that illuminates the lives of former internees in the postwar era, both in struggle and unlikely triumph. Readers will appreciate the painstaking efforts that rebuilding required, and will feel inspired by the activism that led to redress and restitution-and that built a community that even now speaks out against other racist agendas.

About the Authors:
Naomi Hirahara is a writer of both nonfiction books and mysteries. With Geraldine Knatz, she cowrote Terminal Island: The Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor, which won a Bruckman Award for Excellence and an Award of Merit from the Conference of California Historical Societies. Her Edgar Award–winning Mas Arai mysteries have been published in France, Japan, and Korea. A former editor of the Rafu Shimpo newspaper, she also curates historical exhibitions and writes articles and short stories.

Heather C. Lindquist is the editor of Children of Manzanar, a copublication by Heyday and Manzanar History Association, which received an award of excellence from the Association of Partners for Public Lands in 2013, and she was one of several contributing authors to Freedom in My Heart: Voices from the United States National Slavery Museum, published by National Geographic in 2007. She has also written numerous exhibit scripts for museums, visitor centers, and national parks across the country, including Manzanar National Historic Site; the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville, Georgia; the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Hardcover
Pages: 208
Dimensions: 6.2 x 0.7 x 9 inches