Fresh Meat for Your Bookshelf

Is it just Seattlest or does the Amazon.com site suddenly look stupider?

We went over there to pick up our favorite local journalist's most recent book, which Amazon starts shipping today, and things look different. Their marketing department probably insists that it's a "fresh, engaging look, consistent with current electronic design trends." We say stupider.

"Strawberry Days : How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community" by Dave Neiwert is about...well, the subtitle about says it all. Couldn't leave anything for us to tell, could you Dave? A vivid and moving tale, says the Amazon blurb, about Japanese immigrant strawberry farmers in Bellevue until Pearl Harbor hit the fan.

From his website:

I'm especially pleased about this, since I've been working on this book since 1992, when I first wrote the newspaper series for the old Bellevue Journal American which gave the book its origins. I first produced a manuscript in 1994, and have been working on refining and improving it over the ensuing years, when I wasn't working on my other books. I interviewed 28 different internees and Bellevue community members over the years, and I conducted a great deal of archival research as well.

As it happens, events have conspired to make the book even more relevant than before. The combination of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the right-wing program to scapegoat Muslim Americans in its wake -- embodied by Michelle Malkin's book In Defense of Internment, which sought to justify "racial profiling" by demonstrating that the mass internment of 1942 was not simply justified but desirable -- have suddenly made the subject very contemporary indeed.

Seattlest will keep you posted on local readings as they are booked, but most of them won't be until July. You can catch him July, 8 at Village Books in B'ham.