It’s a real bummer that it’s been about 11 months since I last attended an event. It’s probably an even bigger bummer to folks like my friend Bradford Pearson, a former D associate editor and People Newspapers reporter who has spent the last few years of his life researching and writing a book. It came out earlier this month, well before most of us have had vaccines shot in our arms.
So, of course, the book tour moved online. But the one nice thing about all this is that the conversation doesn’t disappear after it wraps up. On Tuesday, Interabang Books invited West Texas-based author Rachel Monroe (whose book Savage Appetites is also very good and now out in paperback) to interview Brad about his new book, The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America. You can purchase it here.
It’s a great conversation that doesn’t give away too much of his narrative, but signals that too many of us do not understand the full story of the incarceration of Japanese Americans that happened after Pearl Harbor. Brad’s book is ostensibly about a really good football team made up of Japanese American high schoolers who were taken from their homes and relocated to the Heart Mountain camp in Cody, Wyoming. But it’s a bigger story about the history of immigration and longstanding racism in America, themes that are not unlike what we’re seeing play out today.
The video is after the jump. (It’s also a good point to mention that Interabang has convened a lot of great author chats during the pandemic; you can watch them all here. Skip Amazon and support a local bookstore.)
