Farewell to Manzanar

Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

In Farewell to Manzanar, 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.

Book Summary

TitleFarewell to Manzana
AuthorJeanne Wakatsuki Houston,
James D. Houston
PublisherClarion Books; Reprint edition (December 12, 2023)
Pages224 Pages

Manzanar (Images of America)

Manzanar (Images of America) by Jane Wehrey
Manzanar (Images of America) by Jane Wehrey

Through a collection of vintage photographs, the Images of America series allows readers to explore the history that makes each city, town, or state unique.

East of the rugged Sierra Nevada in California’s Owens Valley lies Manzanar. Founded in 1910 as a fruit-growing colony, it was named in Spanish for the fragrant apple orchards that once filled its spectacularly scenic landscape. Owens Valley Paiute lived there first, followed by white homesteaders and ranchers. But with the onset of World War II came a new identity as the first of 10 “relocation centers” hastily built in 1942 to house 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, removed from the West Coast. In the face of upheaval and loss, Manzanar’s 10,000 confined residents created parks, gardens, and a functioning wartime community within the camp’s barbed-wire-enclosed square mile of flimsy barracks.
Today Manzanar National Historic Site commemorates this and all of Manzanar’s unique communities.

About the Author

Author Jane Wehrey, a historian and Owens Valley native, also wrote Voices From This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and Manzanar Pasts and has been a consultant, park ranger, and exhibit writer at Manzanar National Historic Site. For this pictorial odyssey through Manzanar’s past, she compiled images from private and museum archives and from an extraordinary wartime record that includes photographs by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and former Manzanar internee Toyo Miyatake.

Book Summary

TitleManzanar (Images of America)
AuthorJane Wehrey
PublisherArcadia Publishing
Pages128 Pages