[Review of] Richard Drinnon. Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Meyer and American Racism

While American history is replete with outrageous and tragic examples of racism, two of the most prominent in recent memory are the government\u27s World War II removal and internment of Japanese Americans and its postwar attack on the tribal rights and consequently the services, reservations, and cultural integrity of Native Americans through a policy known as termination. Ironically, these two episodes intersect in the person of Dillon Meyer. Meyer ran the vast archipelago of Japanese American concentration camps as the Director of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) from 1942-46 and then administered a larger system of lndian reservations as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) from 1950-53. In this latter post, Meyer launched an aggressive effort to withdraw the government from its commitments and responsibilities for Native Americans that culminated in termination legislation after he left office

[Review of] Philip S. Foner and Daniel Rosenberg , eds. Racism, Dissent, and Asian Americans from 1850 to the Present: A Documentary History

Numerous historical studies discuss racism against Asian Americans as well as their resistance to racist policies, practices, and thought. While this scholarship correctly stresses the predominance of racism, it contains passing references to non-Asian individuals and organizations who supported better treatment and the rights of Asians. Foner and Rosenberg argue that these small numbers of supporters were dissenters from prevailing anti-Asian racism and that they deserve greater attention because they represent the existence of more than one perspective of Asian Americans

[Review of] Ruthanne Lum McCunn. Sole Survivor

In November, 1942, the British freighter Benlomond was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of South America with the loss of its entire crew except for a young Chinese steward named Poon Lim. Through his resourcefulness and determination, Lim survived on a wooden raft for 133 days before being picked up by a Brazilian fisherman. Sole Survivor is a fictionalized account of Lim\u27s experience, the longest such ordeal at sea, based largely on interviews with Lim, military and maritime documents, and magazine and newpaper [newspaper] stories

[Review of] Roger Daniels. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850

Roger Daniels is one of the premier scholars of Asian American history and has previously done pathbreaking research on the anti-Japanese movement in California and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Now, in Asian America, Daniels presents an interpretive account of the Chinese and Japanese in the U.S. In doing so, he attempts to show that these groups are an integral part of the immigration and ethnic history of America, especially by stressing parallels in the experiences of Asian and European immigrants. Daniels further argues that, because of a number of factors, there are differences as well as similarities in the experiences of Chinese and Japanese Americans. Daniels begins by examining Chinese immigration, the anti-Chinese movement, and Chinese settlement up to World War II and then he covers the same areas for the Japanese. This is followed by a discussion of both groups during the war, a chapter on the Cold War era, and an epilogue on happenings from 1960 to the 1980s

[Review of] Eugene Eoyang, Coat of Many Colors: Reflections on Diversity by a Minority of One

Eoyang\u27s volume is a collection of personal essays that call for a more diverse conception of American culture and society. While the latter, of course, is a familiar if not universally-accepted theme, this actually is an unconventional and highly effective book because of the range of issues it covers and the author\u27s basic writing strategy

[Review of] Michi Kodama-Nishimoto, et al. Hanahana, An Oral History Anthology of Hawaii\u27s Working People

Oral history is unquestionably an important method for recovering the history of ethnic groups, particularly of ethnic working people who leave few written accounts of their own and whose lives are often ignored or else inadequately described by outsiders because of their apparent routineness and unimportance. Unfortunately, many oral history materials remain unknown and unused except by occasional researchers. In 1976, the Hawaii State Legislature established the Oral History Project (OHP, formerly the Ethnic Studies Oral History Project) at the University of Hawaii to record the recollections of ethnic working men and women. Since then, OHP has interviewed over 250 individuals through several major projects. To OHP\u27s credit, it has gone beyond this stage and reached out to the public through slide shows, videotaped documentaries, workshops, a newsletter, and two books, Uchinanchu and Hanahana

[Review of] Elionne Belden. Claiming Chinese Identity

Thirty years ago, when the field of Asian American studies was in its infancy, identity was one of the subjects that received much attention. Since then, a good deal of research on or related to identity has been conducted, and, in the past few years, several significant pieces of work have been published. Claiming Chinese Identity is not among the latter

[Review of] Hyung-chan Kim, ed. Asian American Studies: An Annotated Bibliography and Research Guide

Hyung-chan Kim\u27s bibliography of humanities and social science materials on Asian Americans has two basic but important assets. First, its 3,396 entries encompass a large proportion of the relevant literature (creative writing and federal government publications have been excluded as they are adequately covered in other sources). Second, the bibliography is nicely organized. It is divided into two main sections dealing respectively with historical and contemporary matters. Each section has chapters on a variety of subjects, for example marriage and family, community organizations, immigration and refugees, and acculturation, adaptation and assimilation. Within each chapter, the appropriate books/monographs, articles, and theses/dissertations are listed alphabetically by author

[Review of] Lance Liebman, ed., Ethnic Relations in America

This small volume contains six background papers prepared under the editorship of Lance Liebman, professor of law at Harvard, for a 1981 meeting on ethnic relations convened by the American Assembly, a well-known policy institution affiliated with Columbia University