"By the pricking of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes"
-Second Witch (Macbeth)(Quelle: wunderkiste)
During World War II over 100,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants were forced to leave their homes on the west coast for internment camps inland. Japanese Americans in Hawaii and other parts of the country were generally allowed to remain in their homes and live normal lives. Communities developed in the internment camps with schools, movie theaters, and community gardens but housing was substandard and internees were not allowed to come and go as they pleased. Travel to neighboring towns was heavily restricted to work details and very limited personal business such as obtaining marriage licenses. Treated as threats in their own country, interned Japanese Americans were not granted an official apology until 1988.
Kimi Cunningham Grant is the granddaughter of Japanese American internees, but her family rarely talked about the experience. Silver Like Dust is the story of her grandparent’s internment filtered through Kimi’s conversations with her Obaachan. It is a memoir of a granddaughter learning about internment rather than a first hand account of internment.
In contrast to the classic book about Japanese American internment Farewell to Manzanar which focuses on a young girl, Silver Like Dust follows an adult woman as she marries and has her first child at the camp and her difficulty of coming to grips with that experience decades later. Obaachan was deeply embarrassed by her internment but it was also the setting for some of the most important moments of her life.
I read Farewell to Manzanar in sixth grade and I’d recommend it to younger (<14) readers who are curious about Japanese internment. It covers what it was like to be a young girl in the camps, going to school, worrying about a brother serving oversees, and watching how her parents react to internment. But for older readers, I’d recommend Silver Like Dust which tells a less straightforward narrative and shows the generational divide between internees and their grandchildren.
"We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today."
-Cory Doctorow (via bugseatbooks)(Quelle: susannathinks)
Public bookshelves spread across Germany
COLOGNE, Germany—Take a book, leave a book. In the birthplace of the printing press, public bookshelves are popping up across the nation on street corners, city squares and suburban supermarkets.
In these free-for-all libraries, people can grab whatever they want to read, and leave behind anything they want for others. There’s no need to register, no due date, and you can take or give as many as you want.
“This project is aimed at everyone who likes to read — without regard to age or education. It is open for everybody,” Michael Aubermann, one of the organizers of the free book exchange in the city of Cologne, told The Associated Press.
