The Colorado Sun: At my grandson’s suggestion, I’m reading Daniel James Brown’s “Facing the Mountain,” a vivid and unflinching account of the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans. Cale loved listening to the audio version of Brown’s bestseller “The Boys in the Boat” years ago when we drove to Utah for a rafting trip, so it was no surprise that he would find Brown’s new book so compelling.
“Facing the Mountain” recounts events from the 1940s and yet it feels utterly of the moment. Neighbors, business owners, farm workers, World War I veterans, teachers, ROTC soldiers, students, children in foster homes, people in hospital beds, newborn babies, the elderly and disabled in nursing facilities were taken at gunpoint and forced to live in horse stables and windswept concentration camps with squalid toilets, no privacy and food budgets of 33 cents per person per day.
Anyone with even 1/16th Japanese ancestry was deemed an enemy. Roughly 120,000 Americans, many citizens by birth, others who were not allowed to become citizens by virtue of their Asian ancestry, were denied due process and treated like animals.
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