The attack on Pearl Harbor did more than plunge the United States into a two-front war, it turned over 120,000 Japanese-Americans into prisoners of war--in their own country. Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were being rounded up in California. “Swept up in the first wave of arrests were nearly all the Japanese fishermen on Terminal Island—an area just five miles long and largely manmade in Los Angeles harbor. These fishermen were part of a thriving,...

The debate lingers: why didn’t Hollywood’s studios produce anti-Nazi pictures before war was all but imminent in the 1930s? Plenty has been written about the lack of films that might have alerted the American public to what was happening in Europe at the time. But Laura Rosenzweig, the author of Hollywood’s Spies, says attention also needs to be focused on the political activity going on around Hollywood in Southern California in the 1930s, activity that was being orchestrated from Berlin.&nb...

If you want to find a relaxed approach to planning your finances, Carl Richards has it for you, complete with 101 simple sketches: Your Money. It's an approach Richards employed as a financial writer for the New York Times for 10 years: using boxes, circles, and squiggly lines to illustrate basic messages about money. Two circles, one marked "things that matter," the other, "things I can control." The part where they intersect is darkened in with the message: "what I try to focus on." Richard...

The arrival of the nuclear age ushered in yet another chapter in America’s horror history. Jeremy Dauber, the Columbia University professor who previously wrote a history of comics in this country, now digs a little deeper for American Scary. When John Hersey’s Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker, the public learned what it was like to be incinerated by an atomic bomb. Other horrors were to come. Dauber starts in the American Republic’s early...

Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com. His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the year...

The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul is back in business. That's the mental health clinic that appears for those who need it. We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat is a follow-up to We'll Prescribe You a Cat, a bestselling Japanese novel. Both books have been translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda. The clinic--with its unconventional doctor and forceful nurse--uses a prescribed cat to heal the emotional wounds of its patients. The sequel introduces a new cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a fou...

Mars is held in high esteem on Earth. It’s a neighboring planet but, unlike Venus, our neighbor closest to the Sun, the planet stands as the closest thing to Earth in our solar system. It’s not inhabited, but robots now roving the planet continue to search for evidence that there might have been life there once. But when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1897, a tale about an attack from beyond, it came at a time when Mars had become a hot topic. You had songs, dances, and advertisements ...

Moses Jacob Ezekiel may be a 19th-century sculptor who’s been largely forgotten, but his work hasn’t been. A member of the Jewish faith who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Ezekiel is described as a complex figure. Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, examines some of that complexity in her book, Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor. As the first Jewish American artist to win international acclaim, Ezekiel (1844-1917) was a pro...

David Obst wants to end America’s love affair with the car. Saving Ourselves from Big Car defines “Big Car” as that complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench auto dependence. Author David Obst (pronounced “oops-t”), the former literary agent for Woodward and Bernstein, is still on the case. Instead of Watergate, he’s exposing how these companies have pursued profit at the expense of the common good. He details how the indu...

When it comes to World War II, you often hear about "the arsenal of democracy," a characterization of U.S. factories that produced all the food, medical supplies, tanks, planes, and tractors that helped win the war. In Launching Liberty, Doug Most writes about the U.S. effort required to build the ships needed to transport those goods overseas. The Liberty Ships were 440-foot cargo ships built to the same exact specifications. Over 2,700 were built between 1941 and 1945. When packed full of c...

If draining the swamp strikes you as a good idea, you're not listening to Clare Howard and David Zalaznik. The pair, former journalists with the Peoria Journal Star, have just written their second book extolling the benefits of wetlands. Their first, In the Spirit of Wetlands (2022), captured the beauty and importance of wetlands in Illinois. This time, Wisdom of the Marsh (Syracuse University Press) focuses on the Montezuma Wetlands Complex in central New York. "Wetlands are much more than s...

Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country. The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry. Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia, a wartime musical released when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally. No pre-war congressional investigation ev...

Tiffany Jenkins takes a look at privacy in her new book, Strangers and Intimates. As Jenkins points out, the whole concept of privacy is a relatively recent development. She points to an article published in 1890 by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who finished one-two in their graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1875. Brandeis went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. The two legal scholars asserted that people without a public role had “a right to be left alone,” embracing the pu...

T. Lindsay Baker’s Eating Up Route 66 is not your typical Mother Road guidebook. It’s a history—with business notes, photographs, and recipes. Baker, a retired history professor from Texas has written plenty about the American West. Twelve years of research went into his latest effort, and not just in libraries and museums. An antique-car enthusiast, Baker traveled the road in a 1930 Ford station wagon in 2017. Not just a day trip, mind you, but the length of the route--and back. In a f...

If you haven’t read an oral history before, it’s like flashing through comments that sometimes follow an online article. Only with a difference: you don’t see those back-and-forth arguments that always seem to break out among those commenting. For Garrett Graff, it’s his third oral history effort. After 9-11 (The Only Plane in the Sky) and D-Day (When the Sea Came Alive), this time it’s the creation and delivery of the atomic bomb during World War II. The Devil Reached Toward the Sky follows ...

When you get through reading America America by Greg Grandin, a Yale University history professor, you have to wonder what might have been when it comes to U.S. policies regarding Latin America over the years. Grandin figures that Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes in Latin American countries between 1961 and 1969. He goes into great detail outlining U.S. involvement in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Brazil. While U.S. officials are interfering with Latin American governments, ma...

Liza Tully’s previous literary effort was a grim thriller set in Siberia. “It was a suspense novel, but I realized it was very dark,” she said. The author, who wrote Finding Katarina M under the pseudonym Elisabeth Elo, decided to follow that with something a little lighter. The result? The feel-good mystery, The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant. Her latest effort teams Aubrey Merritt, “a brilliant Boomer detective," with Olivia Blount, “an ambitious Gen Z assistant.” To...

Michael Doyle's Nightmare in the Pacific is a book about an aspect of World War II you probably haven’t heard before: the saga of Artie Shaw, the big-band leader who took his group on a whirlwind tour of the Pacific in 1942-1943. What makes this story so interesting are the characters involved: Artie Shaw, himself, the motley group of band members that Shaw recruited himself, as well as figures from the worlds of the military and show business. Even before the United States joined the w...

A new book looks at the short history of the freedom of choice. Some of us have more choices than we’ve ever had—from what to buy and where to live and whom to love, even what to believe--but how did that come about? That’s the basis of the book Sophia Rosenfeld has written, called The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. Rosenfeld said she wanted to find those times when the early forms of choice were taking shape—when you could marry whomever you wanted, shop for what you mig...

China is sometimes described as the forgotten theater of war during World War II. But it’s unlikely that the Chinese people have forgotten their eight-year war with Japan, a ferocious engagement that began four years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's estimated that as many as 20 million Chinese died in the war. In Fallen Tigers, Daniel Jackson recounts U.S. involvement in China, where the country provided supplies and air support to a nation that desperately needed it. U.S. airmen who ...