Korematsu V. United States: Japanese-American Internment Camps (Landmark Supreme Court Cases)
Gr. 7^-10. Part of the Landmark Supreme Court Cases series, this work examines the history of the Japanese American internments during World War II--causes, conditions, lasting effects--by focusing on one man and his legal case. Fred Korematsu, an American citizen, challenged the government's right to remove him from his home and imprison him as a potential threat to national security simply because he was Japanese American. The writing is clear and direct, and the book design is spacious, with lots of subheads and black-and-white photographs throughout. Students will be interested not so much in the closely detailed legal arguments of the defense and prosecution as in the historical background of what happened and why and the issues of compensation and apology. The case will stimulate group discussion on racism, then and now. This is for an older audience than that for most of the books listed in the Read-alikes column on p.1523, but readers may want to go from here to some of those moving fictional accounts.Hazel Rochman