Choice 评论

Daniels has written extensively on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans by the federal government in concentration camps during WW II, e.g., Concentration Camps USA (CH, Oct '72); and he was the first editor of Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (CH, Jan '87). For the work under review, he has selected archival, official, and other documents, that "trace and explicate. . .the decision to submit a whole people. . .to internal exile, {{and}} delineate the execution and modification of that policy. . ." (introd.). It is mainly the positions of the War Department and the Army that are documented. The basic arrangement is chronological. The intended audience is the research student. This review is based upon inspection of Volume 1, which also contains a table of contents for the set. With one exception, the documents are copies of the originals, classification stamps and margin notes included. Certainly one gets the "feel" of doing research in primary sources. But the minimal amount of editing seriously reduces the usefulness of the work. There is no list of document titles, unless as part of a document, and no indexes. There is no pagination, which will present problems in citation. Nor are there any references, explanatory notes, or annotations. Better editing would have eliminated repetitious documents and discovered the error of printing the same document on facing pages at the end of Volume 1. Only libraries collecting comprehensively on Japanese Americans or WW II should contemplate buying this set. Otherwise, it is not recommended. -D. W. Barthell, The George Washington University