Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Houston: Farewell to Manzanar

My personal biases are such that when my purpose in reading a book colors my approach to it.  When I am reading something for work, which is to say in order to teach it in the classroom, I see it primarily through that lens and analyze it accordingly.  When I am reading something I perceive to be canonical, I tend to approach it more broadly and philosophically.  There are surprises and course-corrections in each case.  Sometimes a presumably fluffy book turns out to be deeply literate and resilient to that sort of scrutiny, as in the case of The Hunger Games.  Sometimes the opposite is true, as documented here more times that I care to go back and count. A dilemma arises when a book is both potential classroom material and, if not canonical, at least "important" in the canonical discourse.  This was the case, for example, with Rosa Parks' My Story, and it is the case with the work under consideration now. As in the former case, it turns out to disappoint on literary levels, though to retain its significance.  Perhaps it is a function of non-writers having something that needs to be said. Perhaps it is more a byproduct of what constitutes "should" in the literary and cultural mind.  At any rate, Manzanar left this read feeling unsatisfied, and this teacher feeling well-equipped.