No comments about HOME AGAIN - The Stirring Biography of a Japanese-American Family.

No comments about GANDI Autobiography 1 - Closer To The Truth Of Various Experiments (Gift Paperback) Japanese Language Book.

2 comments about Seiji Ozawa (Contemporary Asian Americans).

1. I suggest this book for 3rd to 4th grade. It is pitifuly easy. I do find it very imformational with a timeline, bibliography, glossary, and index in the back. It does also have a short paragraph on the back. Otherwise, it was mildly boring.



2. I think this book is pitifuly easy. It does have a good timeline, bibliography ext. in the back. It is imformational, but also very boring. I thought the only interesting part was about his childhood.

4 comments about Under the Rising Sun: Memories of a Japanese Prisoner of War.

1. How can one write a review that could compare with the author's real life experiences. I met Mario through my friend Hal Stephens who wrote the introduction .. I then traveled with Hal up and down the West Coast to book dealers and museums .. their reception was highly enthusiastic. The Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC reviewed the book for its 50th Anniversary of World War II but it was submitted too late for their collection .. unfortunate for those who would have wished for a daily recording of the misfortunes of those on the Death March and the Death Camps. Recollection of experiences is worthwhile, but the daily recording is more significant. My uncle was a POW in Germany; his reading of the book brought home memories that had long been suppressed. Comparisons with the Halocaust survivors' stories can easily be made. Life and Death are with us always, but how one survives Life is always a compelling story. Mario's life span of misadventure was summarized in the Death March and Death Camps. A truly engrossing real life adventure. Reviewed by Dave Pryor.



2. How can one write a review that could compare with the author's real life experiences. I met Mario through my friend Hal Stephens who wrote the introduction .. I then traveled with Hal up and down the West Coast to book dealers and museums .. their reception was highly enthusiastic. The Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC reviewed the book for its 50th Anniversary of World War II but it was submitted too late for their collection .. unfortunate for those who would have wished for a daily recording of the misfortunes of those on the Death March and the Death Camps. Recollection of experiences is worthwhile, but the daily recording is more significant. My uncle was a POW in Germany; his reading of the book brought home memories that had long been suppressed. Comparisons with the Halocaust survivors' stories can easily be made. Life and Death are with us always, but how one survives Life is always a compelling story. Mario's life span of misadventure was summarized in the Death March and Death Camps. A truly engrossing real life adventure. Reviewed by Dave Pryor.



3. Mario Machi was involved in the famous Battan Death March in the Philippines during World War II. He kept a diary that could have gotten him killed after he was taken prisoner by the Japanese. This story explores the times he spent as a prisoner of war, and his life after the war. It is a fascinating story of compassion and grace.



4. Under the Rising Sun is an extraordinary account of Mario Machi's struggle for survival, an account that few people, even his closest friends knew about. When the war ended he was freed from Bilibid Prison in the Philippines and returned to San Francisco, finished his education, and for 22 years taught junior high school in the small town in California. Mario says he did not write Under the Rising Sun with the intent of producing a war story. For fifty years has kept his thoughts hidden, from his many students and from even his closest friends. He kept to himself the memories of prisoners who marched side by side with him, some too weak to continue, who dropped by the roadside, only to be bayoneted for failing to keep up. Somehow Mario managed to survive the brutality, the hunger, the thirst, the disease, and the dreadful feeling that he had been abandoned. Somehow 10,000 others died on that march, some 178 men for every mile they tread, but Mario Machi lived. What makes this book so extraordinary is that it is not simply an account of an ex-soldier recalling dreadful acts that happened long ago. Mario's account of the Bataan Death March was recorded as it was happening, in a diary that he managed to keep on the march. Each day, often under actual heavy gun fire, he recorded what he saw and witnessed, first hand, and most miraculously, this diary--a written confession that would certainly have meant immediate death had it fallen into enemy hands--has survived to this day. This book is for both the generations who remember Bataan and for those who have yet to hear. On his return to the United States in 1945 Mario Machi was awarded the Bronze Star for the work he did in the camps. Now, nearly fifty years later, he has told his story, and we are all made the richer for it. Why he decided to tell his story is explained in the book.

2 comments about They Can't Take That Away from Me: The Odyssey of an American Pow.

1. This is not a book for just WWII buffs. I guarantee that anyone who appreciates fascinating and well-written non-fiction with an original angle will love They Can't Take That Away From Me. What sold me was the unique and artistic style employed in this POW memoir; it brought a fresh perspective to Ralph Rentz's struggle, triumph and the invincibility of his nightmare.



2. They Can't Take That Away From Me truly is an odyssey of one, rather atypical, American POW. However, it is more than just a "Sentimental Journey". This memoir is unlike any other WWII story, in that it reaches beyond the prosaic collage of nostalgic gore and glory and invites the reader to hear the song inside the bruised head of a musician who finds himself without his band, his saxophone and clarinet, without his freedom and even his own sanity, but never without his music. It is a tough tale, but it is softened with a lyrical literary style that makes it flow like the Pacific. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading about music, adventure and inimitable tragedy.

2 comments about Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: The True Story of a Missionary Family's Survival and Faith in a Japanese Prisoner-Of-War Camp During Wwii.

1. This book is well written and quite well documented. It contains some of the best endnotes I've seen in a long time. The author drew from several other diaries (often not published) to present a more well rounded view often elaborating in the chapter endnotes. My only complaint is that the notes were presented at the end of the chapter instead of as page footnotes. I was constantly flipping pages to access the notes as I read. Overall an interesting book to anyone fascinated with WWII.



2. This book kept me glued to the page. A gripping account of a teenager stuck in a concentration camp without having done anything wrong. A surprising lack of rancor, the author gives a picture of the good and bad in the people on both sides of the conflict. Also unusual are the admissions of less than perfect actions on his own part. It almost made me feel like I had been there.

1 comments about Savage Days, Savage Nights.

1. Soka Gakkai's youth division has compiled in Japanese fifty-six volumes of accounts of Japanese wartime suffering. The English version includes selections from the first twenty-eight of these to create a single gripping book.

   This is not an attempt to plead a national cause; the editors clearly realize that the horror of war knows no nationality. They have been able to persuade the contributors to this volume of one fundamental truth, which is the core of the Buddhism in which they believe: that suffering is born from ignorance. In the hope of dispelling the ignorance of the young about what war really is, these victims have consented to relive their tragic experiences and commit them to paper. Their hope is that this knowledge, once shared, will help to prevent a repeat of the most senseless and savage of all human activities.

No comments about Song in an Age of Discord: The Journal of Socho and Poetic Life in Late Medieval Japan.

No comments about If This Should Be Farewell: A Family Separated by War.

3 comments about Flashbacks: Prisoner of War in the Philippines.

1. T. Walter Middleton gives you a great taste of folksy, oral history used to describe one of the most horrific sequence of events in US military history: the Defense of the Bataan Peninsula, the Bataan Death March, imprisonment in Camp O'Donnell, the Hell Ship experience, and slave labor for a Japanese corporation in Mukden, Manchuria.
   
   Mr. Middleton reveals many details of the horrors of those accumalated experiences. He does so, not with bitterness, but rather with a refreshing and surprising sense of humor. In one chapter he describes how his fellow prisoners discovered a large cache of marijuana which they smoked, and how in the midst of all deaths and diseases, they behaved strangely in an effort to have fun at the expense of the Japanese guards, who were completely confused by their unusual behavior. In one of the final chapters, he expresses the doubts he and his fellow prisoners had that they would ever again be able to fit into a normal, civilized society.
   
   Aside from being a "Great Read", this book will give it's reader a very personal look into the lives of the men who made the Bataan Death March.
   
   Fred Baldassarre
   Researcher/Archivist
   Battling Bastards of Bataan



2. The author, Walter Middleton, was a good friend of my dad's when I was a kid. At about age 10, full of the idea that war is really grand (common among red-blooded males of that age and beyond, it seems), I started bugging Mr. Middleton with questions like, "What did you do in the War?" About the third time I asked, he set me down for about an hour and told me. What I heard changed me forever.

   Many of the things Mr. Middleton told me that day are stories included in this book. I warn you, it is un-PC by standards of the current decade, but the author is to be forgiven if four years of treatment as an animal, by animals, has colored his view of the Japanese as a people. Also, the text is rife with colloquialisms, and there are more than a few grammatical and spelling errors. But the intent was not to write a thesis here. It was to record for succeeding generations the unique perspective of the War, the Japanese captors, and our own officers (including the great MacArthur) from the eyes of our enlisted men, who bore the brunt of the War. In this aim, Mr. Middleton succeeds with five stars. For anyone who has never read an alternative history textbook, I rank "Flashbacks" equal to Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the U.S." and James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me" in importance.

   I have ordered a copy of this book for a friend of mine with whom I have had conversations about how most Americans of my generation have no idea what hard times are really like. (I know I don't, not from first-hand experience such as recorded in this book.) I would have sent my own copy to my friend, except that it is a signed copy, and even more importantly because I will want to pass it down to the next generations in my family. This reading is not pleasant, but it is vitally important. The history embodied in this book must be kept alive. Read it and pass it on.




3. I just so happen to be the great niece of Mr. Walter T. Middleton. This book was a very heart moving book to read. For a person to go through the treatment that he endured is a miracle. This book is great. He is an outstanding storyteller and this book is a page turner. I would recamend this book to anyone looking for stories during this time perod.