In an extraordinary blend of narrative history, personal recollection, and oral testimony, the author presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. He writes of the Chinese who laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad, of plantation laborers in the cane fields of Hawaii, and of "picture brides" marrying strangers in the hope of becoming part of the American dream. He tells stories of Japanese-Americans behind the barbed wire of U.S. internment camps during World War II, Hmong refugees tragically unable to adjust to Wisconsin's alien climate and culture, and Asian-American students stigmatized by the stereotype of the "model minority." This is a powerful and moving work that will resonate for all Americans, who together make up a nation of immigrants from other shores.
Ronald Takaki's critically acclaimed A Different Mirror is a dramatic retelling of our nation's past that relates the history of America in the voice of its non-Anglo peoples, from Native Americans to Muslim refugees from Afghanistan.
In Double Victory, a broad spectrum of American voices emerges to illustrate the country's multicultural struggles and victories during World War II. We hear from a Japanese-American at an internment camp; a Native American code breaker using the Navajo language for the first time; a Mexican-American woman, "Rosarita, the riveter," who was able to work a job during wartime other than as a housecleaner or a maid. Takaki also considers the racial biases that influenced important American government actions during the war, like the bombing of Hiroshima and the refusal to admit Jews into the U.S. Double Victory clearly demonstrates that World War II helped to transform American society and advance the cause of multiculturalism throughout the country.
Takaki takes us back to our nation's founding principles - to the Declaration of Independence and the inalienable rights guaranteed by our Constitution - and implores us to remember that 'the Declaration of Independence…belongs to all of us…as members of humanity.'
Ronald Takaki, a third-generation American of Japanese ancestry and professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley for over two decades, reflects on the past and the future of America's expanding ethnic diversity and how this diversity will affect the way we relate as individuals and as a nation to the rest of the world.