The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559 Mirror Lake Internment Camp, California, 1942 (My Name Is America) by Barry Denenberg

The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559 Mirror Lake Internment Camp, California, 1942 (My Name Is America) Reviews

• 
  Sheri

  I thought this started off well and showed the physical, mental, and emotional difficulties of life in an internment camp. I was irked by the fact that the people literally had nothing to do all day, but were charged money to attend events like concerts. They did find some ways to occupy their time, but were awfully limited in means and mode.
  
  I came into this book with no real knowledge of Japanese internment camps, and while I learned a little, I was left wanting something more. The surprisingly abrupt ending didn't provide a satisfactory continuance or conclusion to Ben's story. The epilogue offered very brief answers to what became of the major characters, but I expected more about Ben himself. I know he's a fictional character but I still would have liked to know how his time at the camp affected his life in the future. The historical note was informative, providing context and a better understanding of the why.
  
  A good topic to be included in the series as it covers an important part of history, but not as enlightening as other books in the series.
• 
  Jenny Clark

  This is a journal about a time few children know about now. They do know about world war 2, but the internment of the Japanese not so much.
  This book does a good job of showing what it was like, and how many people reacted. Ben is an extremely relatable character, as he has the typical worries of a 12 year old, as well as the worries of the internment camp. He has a very sarcastic voice as well, which I loved.
  This is a good series to get young kids interested in history.
• 
  LobsterQuadrille

  The Good:
  -Ben's narration was done well. He is funny, sarcastic, and believable as a snarky but good-hearted teen.
  -The side characters are likable too.
  -There are some enjoyable smaller side plots, and good descriptive detail of the environment.
  -There is a labeled photo of Manzanar that folds out at the very end. Interesting detail that I have never seen in a Dear America book before.
  
  The Bad:
  -The emotional effects on the camp prisoners were skimmed over. Ben sometimes shows frustration and cynicism in a snappy one-liner, but there was nothing truly impactful enough to make me feel what he felt.
  -The proverb about many chopsticks being stronger than one, and the description of traditional ways as "Japanesey" feel awkward in the hands of a writer who isn't Japanese. I don't think there was any bad intent in this, it just plays too much into stereotypes.
  -The story stops completely out of the blue, and doesn't leave you with anything interesting to think about. And there are a lot of loose ends. Did Charles Hamada and Ben become friends? How did Mr. Uchida's condition really impact the family? We'll never know!
  -Epilogues aren't Barry Denenberg's strong point. So you're out of luck if you want to know if Naomi became an artist, or why Ben never got married despite clearly being interested in girls. It's just sparse and unsatisfying.
  
  A better World War II Barry Denenberg book than Early Sunday Morning, but not great.
• 
  Tori

  Finally, this is the last book in the series by Denenberg. Another dud. Did he even have an editor review this? The dates kept getting messes up. I thought it would be explained later that Ben got the dates mixed up because of where he was, but no. One day it was Monday, June 15th. Followed by an entry from Friday, June 9th, then followed by an entry from Sunday, June 18th. This happened throughout the book and was very distracting.
  
  The end was abrupt and dark. It also didn't give a very good picture of how long this happened. Also at one point a kid answered that Chicago is the capital of Illinois, which is wrong, but there was no correction of that. I wonder what other facts he messed up.
• 
  Austin Phadoungsyavong

  I think about this Ben from China or somewhere and he name Ben Uchida's family move in america and prison gate just inside and outside hot weather then they give number make know number just like code but I know he doing and something.
• 
  Janet

  Great in its realism at the beginning but then ended abruptly and left the whole story hanging. Would have been great if it had kept going.
• 
  Jonathan Koan

  I read this book as prep work for my history class for 5th graders that I'm teaching. Its an entertaining story, and the beginning lays some great groundwork for understanding the time-period. I hoped for more discussions of the greater political situations, but that didn't happen. Obviously, this is a kids book written as a diary, so I'm not disappointed necesarily that I didn't get my deeper historical contexts.
  
  That said, the overall story was fairly light on plot, more served as a general book about what life was like in the Japanese internment camps. It really loses steam near the end, and needed some more solid resolution. Instead, the book cuts right oto an epilogue that tries to "and then this character married this character and this character got a job here". It could have had 20 more pages to give the ending a proper climax and a proper resolution.
  
  Overall, an ok book with great messages about treating people differently. 6 out of 10.
• 
  Nancy

  Ashamed that this happened, but glad that it's documented.
• 
  Julie Suzanne

  A fictional journal of a boy before and during his internment during WWII that I definitely recommend using this with middle school students as a supplement to their social studies unit on WWII. The sentence structure and vocabulary are just right for my student population, and the narrator is REALISTIC--he sounds like my kids.
  
  Conflicts include the father being taken away to be interrogated for over a year, the rest of the family being sent to god knows where, life in the internment camp, getting father back a zombie, having a friend get involved in baseball gambling and then throwing a game, having a roommate who has been separated from his wife in Japan who worries throughout the book only to finally find relief when he receives letter indicating that she and his daughter are safe at his brother's house in Hiroshima.....
  
  They boy reports about the problems and the benefits in a seemingly honest way, and I did get a better sense of life in the camp than when I read a nonfiction book about Japanese Internment in my middle school library.
  
  My issue with the text is this: The author writes in near-perfect, grammatically sound sentences that still captures this middle-school voice. For example, he'd say that this know-it-all kid is "half Japanese, half Jerk" and when he's talking, Ben "tried not to puke." So, I could see the narrator being a normal kid. I know that my students can't write with perfect punctuation, and I'm so THANKFUL that the author chose to write with the standards of proper English anyway, at no expense, even though it's a "journal." The problem is, just like in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, the author uses improper grammar as far as pronoun usage goes, which angers me! Why? Why? Why? (Example: "Me and Naomi went to the mess hall") This kind of error is so pervasive in this country that soon the correct syntax "Naomi and I went to the mess hall") will sound completely foreign. I want my students to read more SO THAT they will be exposed to proper grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling. Since the author chose not to use real-life lack of punctuation and a bunch of spelling errors, my only guess is that these authors (Denenberg & Jeff Kinney) really don't know better. I assume that they themselves don't know how to use the correct pronoun in a sentence with a compound subject or direct object.
  
  I have noticed that the word "till" as a shortened version of "until" is now commonly used and accepted. It's in my son's basal readers AND in countless books that I've read in the last month. Will it be acceptable, pretty soon, to start saying "Me and him are best friends" ? While I will perpetually cringe, I suppose it will make my job easier (I don't really mean that).
  
  I implore the editors of this book series (Dear America) to publish no more books without correcting these errors!
  
  Overall, a good text to peddle to your students for educational purposes (at the expense of your grammar lessons). It even includes some nonfiction historical background at the end of the book for which I am enthusiastically envisioning the possibilities.
  
• 
  Beverly

  Two months after Pearl Harbor, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which called for the internment of Japanese Americans. There was no such internment for Italian or German Americans. Japanese bank accounts were frozen, which caused them to sell off businesses, furnishings,and autos at huge losses. They were put on trains for unknown destinations, in violation of their Constitutional Rights. No Charges, No Trial... Camps were in the most desolate areas of California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Arkansas, Colorado, and Wyoming. These camps would normally house combat soldiers for a short duration, but in 1941, they housed 8 people in a 20X22 room for the duration of the war.
  
  Anti Asian Discrimination began with the influx of Chinese laborers for the TransContinental Railroad. They were assigned only the most dangerous jobs. By 1850, California had passed State Articles that prohibited citizenship, court testimony, public education, and employment in any profession that required licsensing. By 1882, Congress passed a Chinese Excluslion Act, which limited immigration. This created a cheap labor source, so they began to import Japanese. They fell under the same restrictions as the Chinese. It wasn't until 1952, when the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act allowed first generation Asian Americans citizenship.
  
  Pearl Harbor and Exec. Order 9066 were later called "Legalized Racism" by a Supreme Court Justice. Time heals all wounds, however, and President Ford, in 1976, rescinded that order and called it "an honest reckoning of a national mistake." President Reagan, in 1988, signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered an Official U.S. Apology and a $20,000 restitution to survivors. He also paid tribute to Japanese-American soldiers who had died in battle.
  
  My favorite Reagan saying, "Blood soaked into a sandy beach is all one color. America is unique in that is not founded on race, but on ideals. Because of our diversity, we have the strength of the world. THAT is the American Way."
• 
  Catie Kelly

  The two-star rating is a little misleading -- I thought this book was churning along really pretty well, with a readable and nuanced vision of how a middle school boy might have felt thrown into an World War II internment camp. Then the story crashed to a screeching halt in January 1943, right when the adults at Mirror Lake are presented with the War Department's loyalty questionnaire. Ben does some interesting rumination on how Japanese-Americans could assert their identities by giving various answers to the questions, and then bam, the book is over. All the developing plot arcs stop dead, with no resolution other than a weak and sketchy epilogue, followed by the obligatory historical note and picture section.
  
  It was just so weird. I'm beginning to think this is part of the required formula for the My Name is America series, because the Donner Party one did exactly the same thing. I don't remember the Dear America books I read a decade ago chopping off like this; they definitely seemed to have satisfying endings. Anyway, I'd love to know the reasoning behind the ending style of these books, because it really destroys the story.
  
  It's worth saying, though -- from a historigraphical basis, the end note deserves a review of its own; it provides a very interesting condensed-version history of Asian-Americans in the United States aimed at preteens, running from the transcontinental railroad through the Alien Land Law and McCarran-Walter Act, up to the restitution in 1988. It may be the part of the book that provides the most to chew on.
• 
  Jen

  I knew the basic story behind Topaz and other such internment camps. But for some reason I had never truly realized how much they were like the Nazi concentration camps. Just as in Europe, people here (Japanese instead of Jews) were deprived of their freedom and property, herded onto trains and buses, and forcibly relocated to armed enclosures in desolate places. And they were given numbers to identify themselves and/or their families. All this without due process of law for 120,000 Japanese Americans, seventy percent of whom were citizens by birth, having been born on American soil. All because others feared that they may feel allegiance to Japan rather than America. Even though not even a single case of subversive activity was found to be committed by a Japanese American during all of World War II. And in spite of the fact that we were also at war with Germany and Italy, no Americans of this descent or enemy aliens from these countries were ever subjected to the Exclusion Order, or as Associate Judge Frank Murphy of the U.S. Supreme Court called it, the "legalization of racism." The only real difference between America and the Nazis was that we didn't kill millions of prisoners in the camps.
• 
  Henrique Martinez

  The main characters are: Ben Uchida,Naomi,Mama,and Papa. I don't know anybody like them, though. Ben Uchida is an adventurous boy. Naomi likes to go to school. Papa is very kind. Mama likes to do laundry. The year is 1942, World War Two. The Japanese have to go to camps. Somewhat like concentration camps. That includes the Uchida family. They are Japanese. About 11,000 Japanese were put in camps, when two-thirds were American citizens. The Americans must have thought that the Japanese would go on a riots or something of the sort.
  I liked the book. I never knew about the Japanese-Americans going into camps like that. That is ridiculous, how most were loyal American citizens. This book was hard to put down. It has my recommendation. I hope I influenced people to read it. "Expect the Unexpected"
• 
  Briana

  I liked this book. when I was young I was an avid reader of this and the Dear America series. This book gives good insight into what life in a Japanese internment camp would have been like for a kid. Plus the factual information at the end is very enlightening. There was a Japanese American platoon that was the first to arrive at the concentration camp in dachau, Germany. It is dumbfounding to think that while these men were liberating the Jews from the camp, their family and friends were interned in a concentration camp not that much different than Dachau. I recommend this book for young people or really anyone who wants to learn about Japanese internment camps.
• 
  Andrew

  This book is about a boy named Ben Uchida. He and his family live in an internment camp, because of the pearl harbor bombing. The United States government was afraid so they put the Japanese people in interment camps just to be sure nothing else would happen. So now Ben and his other friends try to live their life, even though they are locked up for some time. What I learned from this book is how cautious the United states government was during world war 2. I thought this was a very interesting book.
• 
  Rosemary Reeve

  I realize this is a kids' book, but I thought it might still make for an interesting read. That really didn't turn out to be the case, however. I don't think it helps that this is an adult writing a fictional journal of a kid. The kid comes off as being extremely cynical (granted, anyone in the internment camps would have good reason to be cynical) and I really wish what substance there is to the book was presented differently. It also ended rather abruptly, as if the author had gotten tired of writing, or had met his page count quota or something.
• 
  Debbie

  Historical fiction
  
  Told from the perspective of a 12 year old boy (one of 110,000 Japanese Americans) imprisoned in an "internment camp" during WWII.
  
  Though I have read numerous books on this subject, it still seems difficult to believe that the United States government could justify doing this to American citizens ... and the rest of America went along with it. Why weren't the Germans and Italians also imprisoned? Lots of questions still remain and many lessons to be learned from this.
• 
  Josh

  This was a good book. It sad hearing about all the Japanese, though. After Pearl Harbor, this kid, along with thousands of other Japanese, are sent to these camps. His dad was taken away from him. They had to sell all their possesions for a small percentage of what they bought them for. They had a horrible, miserable life in the camp. Later, he gets his dad back, but he is never the same. This incident of putting Japanese in camps is regarded as an embarrassment in U.S. history
• 
  Sarah

  it was okay, but not as good as
  A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska, Lattimer, Pennsylvania, 1896. i did learn a couple things about that period in time and the camps though, which was the point.