From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat, the gripping World War II saga of some extraordinary Japanese American patriots: a special Army unit that overcame brutal odds in Europe, their family members who spent the war incarcerated in desolate camps, and a resolute young man who resisted and was jailed for standing up for his constitutional rights.
Some came from farms and small towns and big cities across the mainland of the United States. Others came from sugar plantations in Hawaii. Their families taught them to embrace both their Japanese heritage and American ways. They faced stubborn racial prejudice, but believed they had bright futures as American citizens. But within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI was banging on their doors, ransacking their homes, and hauling away their fathers to undisclosed locations. Within months many of them would themselves be living behind barbed wire in internment camps.
Facing the Mountain is an unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the brutal battlefields of Europe. Based on Daniel James Brown's extensive interviews with the families of the protagonists as well as deep research in archives in Hawaii, California, and Washington, the book focuses on four Japanese-American families and their second-generation young men--the Nisei--who volunteered for 442nd Regimental Combat Team and displayed fierce courage on the battlefields of France, Germany, and Italy. There they were asked to do the near impossible in often suicidal missions.
But this is more than a war story. Brown also explores the lives of these soldiers' immigrant parents, who made their way in America only to be forced to shutter the businesses they had spent decades building, sell their homes for pennies on the dollar, and be taken away to bleak concentration camps. And along the way he introduces a brave young man, Gordon Hirabayashi, who along with other resisters, stood up against their own government to defend the constitutional principles of equality. Whether they fought on battlefields or in courtrooms, these were American families under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best--striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, enduring, prevailing.
