REMEMBERING THE PAST: LIFE IN AMERICA'S CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Heart Mountain: Life in Wyoming's Concentration Camp. By Mike Mackey. Powell, Wyoming: Western History Publications, 2000. vi + 182 pp. Map, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $15.95.

Adios to Tears: the Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps. By Seiichi Higashide. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. ix + 259 pp. Maps, photographs, bibliography, and index. $17.95.

Eileen H. Tamura
University of Hawai‘i

Mike Mackey's Heart Mountain and Seiichi Higashide's Adios to Tears are part of the large and still growing literature on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Within this literature there has been a recent attempt to give greater voice to the experiences of the thousands of detainees who lived in America's concentration camps. In the past twenty years, as oral history has moved from the margins of historical acceptability to mainstream acceptance, writers examining camplife have made greater efforts to record the remembrances of those confined behind barbed wire. These two books reflect this objective.