Nisei Daughter

Since the time of the European conquest of North and South America there has been continual conflict between races, cultures, languages, and social classes. The English and other northern Europeans effectively exterminated the indigenous peoples in the land now occupied by the United States. Only a tiny percentage of these remnant peoples survive on reservations. From James Fenimore Cooper's novels to the film Little Big Man by Arthur Penn Americans have been trying to make sense of the enormity of this culture clash.

After freeing the Atlantic seaboard from indigenous control black African slaves were forcibly brought to the New World to work on labor-intensive sugar and tobacco plantations in the South. The artistic legacy of this Holocaust and its aftermath has been African-American music from blues to be-bop to hip-hop. Writers like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin devoted their literary careers to cracking the metaphorical nut of what it means to be black in a white world. Latin American

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by strangers, the unprovoked attacks, the newspapers fanning the flames of hatred, and the spiriting away of members of the targeted group in the dead of night on flimsy pretexts. The greatest service Sone's book gives the reader is the education it provides about a shameful episode of our national past that has until recently rarely been mentioned in media or academe. America has always dumped its unpleasant realities, such as genocide and slavery, down the memory hole. The tendency is easy to see in the mainstream media's coverage of the debacle of the illegal invasion of Iraq. Sone is a very good writer. She is plain and straightforward, but her mastery of the subtleties of English are clearly on display. Her descriptions of her early childhood are told with a sweet and funny tone: "One day when I was a happy six-year-old, I made the shocking discovery that I had Japanese blood" (3). On the dreaded first day of Japanese school at Nihon Gakko she and her brother Henry had to be pried loose by their mother "though we clung to the cab door like barnacles" (20). Again and again she comes up with an apt phrase that is both vivid and clever. Her style is pure, natural, and sincere. In an early reference to the theme of the boo
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Approximate Word count = 1748
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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