"Barbed Wire Baseball: How One Man Brought Hope to the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII"
by Marissa Moss (Author) and Yuko Shimizu (Illustrator)
As a boy, Kenichi “Zeni” Zenimura dreams of playing professional baseball, but everyone tells him he is too small. Yet he grows up to be a successful player, playing with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig! When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, Zeni and his family are sent to one of ten internment camps where more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry are imprisoned without trials. Zeni brings the game of baseball to the camp, along with a sense of hope. This true story, set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, introduces children to a little-discussed part of American history through Marissa Moss’s rich text and Yuko Shimizu’s beautiful illustrations.
Read by Kendyl Yokoyama, who is in the Ensemble of the North American Tour of Hamilton.
Published in 2013 by Abrams Books for Young Readers.
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