It Did Happen Here

Fear is a funny thing. In our personal life, it often holds us back from things we know we should do. In our nation's collective life, fear often makes us do crazy things...to have a kind of national emotional and moral breakdown that feeds on the sum total and power of individual fears.

Such has been the case lately in our election and in our discussions of immigrants and our fear of the other, amidst a rapidly changing world.

To better understand where we are, we need only look back to the spring of 1942. A time under FDR, when we rounded up over one-hundred thousand residents of Japanese ancestry, living along the West Coast and sent them to detention centers for the duration of the war. Each lost part of their lives and some would argue that our nation lost a part of its soul.

Richard Cahan captures the sadness of that moment in Un-American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II: Images by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Other Government Photographers.

My conversation with Richard Cahan:

Caught Between Two Worlds

Two of the most powerful threads in American history are the immigrant experience and America at war and the impact that those wars have had on the nation and it's people

The impact of WWII, the Japanese American experience and the relationship with Japan that evolved out of the ashes of that war, are the penultimate manifestation of that uniquely American story.

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto has, in her new book Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds  captured its true essence.

My conversation with Pamela Rotner Sakamoto:

Filmmaking that truly stands the test of time

Can you imagine if immediately after 9/11, filmmakers like Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, Fincher or Apatow would enlist in the military to make films about the war on terror? Films that would show America at war against its Taliban and Middle East enemies. Well with the exception of Clint Eastwood, that's pretty hard to imagine.

Yet in WWII, that's exactly what happened. Filmmakers John Ford, William Wyler, Frank Capra, John Houston, and George Stevens would in various ways, join with the military in the war effort.

The work that they did, the impact it had on them personally and on the country, would forever change the workings of Hollywood. It would emphasize the importance of film as entertainment and as an art form,  as well as how Americans viewed war. In that sense, those images still shape our perceptions today as they are a part of our cultural and political DNA.

Mark Harris takes us though the war work of these great Directors in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

My conversation with Mark Harris:

All the Light We Cannot See

Too often in the thinking about the politics of war, we lose sight of its crucible. Of what it does, both good and bad for the people caught up in it. Perhaps thats why we go back so often to WWII, to be freed to understand how the pressure, conflict and survival inherent in war, often brings out both best and the worst of human nature.

Anthony Doerr’s new novel All the Light We Cannot See, does this.

My conversation with Anthony Doerr:

Under the Tuscan spell....Love, War & Murder in Tuscany

After 9/11 and the onset of the war on terror, it became clear that we might be in a permanent state of war. What we forgot, was that war does not exist in a vacuum. It brings out the best and worst within us. It forces us to face a moral paradox that we might not have to face, in times of peace.

This was certainly true in WWII. These are some of the elements that provide the backdrop for Chris Bohjalian’s new novel The Light in the Ruins

It is a love story and thriller set in Florence and Tuscany in the waning days of World War II, as well as in the 1950s. But in many ways, it’s also a cautionary tale about the compromises we make during war.

My recent conversation with Chris Bohjalian:

Here is my conversation with Chris, from a year ago, about The Sandcastle Girls

Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Who Took America to War

As we once again debate America's role in the world, this time in the Middle East, it’s worth noting that there is most assuredly a deep strain of isolationism that courses throughout American history. Perhaps nowhere was this more apparent than in the run up to the Second World War.

Even as Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, only one in forty Americans thought America should get involved. This was the world that FDR faced as he tried to reshape America's vision and it’s place in the world.  He reminded the country that it had a “rendezvous with destiny.”

He would succeed in persuading America.  How he did it, is the the subject of Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World by Michael Fullilove.

My conversation with Michael Fullilove: