Content area
Full Text
One comes to the task of reviewing a book by Roger Daniels prepared to choose fifty synonyms for "excellent" and to string them together into sentences. Prisoners without Trial is no exception. Daniels is one of the profession's most gifted and careful political historians. This is a well-balanced and sharply written essay on the politics of one of the nation's most ignoble episodes: the wartime imprisonment in concentration camps of 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them United States citizens, without any serious justification, simply because of racist hysteria on the part of white Americans. The story has been told many times before, but never more succinctly and never with some of the insights that Daniels offers here.
In the first place, Daniels offers us new villains. His earlier books and those of others laid the blame for the incarceration at the doors of Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, the West Coast...