International Fiction Book Reviews

As I started reading this book, I was struck by two things.  One, this book has the look and feel of a James A. Michener novel; broad, sweeping, long, intricate, descriptive and not intended to be gobbled up in a few days.  The second was the feeling of Roots in in its themes and content.  I was taken back in time to before the black man was taken from Africa as slaves to a new land, through the process of slavery and adaptation and then to the present time.  But this is no Roots, because this is not America.[…]

Eyes Behind Belligerence by K.P. Kollenborn is an ambitious book about complex subjects.  The Yoshimura and Hamaguchi families of Bainbridge Island, off the coast of Washington, endure the bigotry of the 1940s and are forced into the Manzanar Internment Camp, but their stories transcend any location.

Eyes Behind Belligerence is essentially a story of families and how they come to terms with loss — whether of people, life as they knew it, or the ability to make their own choices.  Americans whose ancestry is not Japanese may look at Japanese-American families and see homogeneity.  The book shows that the cultures […]