Nonfiction

The Eagles of Heart Mountain by Bradford Pearson

Lori Carroll
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The Eagles of Heart Mountain, A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in  World War II America, by Bradford Pearson

I was given this ARC by a bookstore owner friend who didn’t have time to work on a review,  and thought I might be interested.  

Oh, yes, very interesting – I thought I knew quite a bit about the Japanese American experience during the war from my father’s stories about the changes in plantation life in Hawaii during the war years; from my distant cousins’ work on reparations for incarceration; from watching Allegiance; from the very controversial two sentences describing Executive Order 9066 and the  resultant camps in my 1970s high school history book getting much discussion at home; from books describing the work of the Military Intelligence Service interpreters and translators in the Pacific Theater and Burma. 

The Eagles of Heart Mountain by Bradford Pearson is 301 pages before you hit the Acknowledgements and Notes, but like the athletes it describes, it punches above its weight class. Highly readable, almost chatty – Pearson sketches biographical details of the people central to his story, weaving in personal, economic, and political events that resulted in the  incarceration of over 100,000 people of Japanese descent with no due process. 

Much of this history has been put into soft focus by changing the then-planned “concentration  camps” into “internment camps” or “relocation camps;” the people from “barbaric Japs” to “internees” or “evacuees.” Pearson carefully and respectfully introduces thoughtful terminology in his Author’s Note. 

The crushing weight of long-term political maneuvering fueled by opportunities for profiteering is laid out in the words of its perpetrators; the deliberate construction of systemic racism shown; the social and economic devastation and waste of exclusion called out; temporary relocation center and camp life detailed; the resistance and quandaries presented by the  loyalty questionnaire and the reinstatement of the draft clarified in prose and quotes. 

I was particularly appalled to see the Fake News strategies and media and politically driven  public hysteria that wore down some originally well-intentioned civil servants. History aligns Japanese Americans much more closely with the Black Lives Matter movement than I knew. My  understanding of the damage done is deeper, and my respect for the soldiers who knew they  were fighting not just for America, but for their families’ right to exist and thrive there is much  greater. 

Oh, yes, there’s also some nail-biting football games.

Review provided for Jan’s bookstore by Jo Oshiro.

Lori Carroll

Lori Carroll

Owner at Jan's
Starting late in life reading, Lori made up for it by becoming a voracious reader. Recently she bought an established bookstore in Beaverton, OR and now spends her day surrounded by nothing but books and booklovers!
Lori Carroll

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