Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009). 290 p. ISBN 9780345505330
This is a story that deserves to be told and retold many times and in numerous ways.
Here’s the gist: soon after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that declared particular areas of the United States to be military zones, resulting in the removal of Japanese and Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to so-called “relocation camps.” Most of the relocated were American citizens, many of them born in the United States. And the “relocation camps” were in fact prison camps in the most austere surroundings. Indeed, some of the camps consisted of nothing but barren land and barbed wire. The internees, known euphemistically as “evacuees,” had to build their own prisons.
