The Scars Of War

Throughout its modern history, China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. During its worst period of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions of civilians lost their lives. For China, the story of modern war-related death and suffering has remained hidden. Hundreds of massacres are still unrecognized by the outside world and even by China itself. The focus of this original hisotry is on the social and psychological, not the economic, costs of war on the country.

Scars of War examines the decisions of U.S. policymakers denying the Amerasians of Vietnam—the biracial sons and daughters of American fathers and Vietnamese mothers born during the Vietnam War—American citizenship. Focusing on the implications of the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act and the 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act, Sabrina Thomas investigates why policymakers deemed a population unfit for American citizenship, despite the fact that they had American fathers. Thomas argues that the exclusion of citizenship was a component of bigger issues confronting the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations: international relationships in a Cold War era, America’s defeat in the Vietnam War, and a history in the United States of racially restrictive immigration and citizenship policies against mixed-race persons and people of Asian descent. Now more politically relevant than ever, Scars of War explores ideas of race, nation, and gender in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Thomas exposes the contradictory approach of policymakers unable to reconcile Amerasian biracialism with the U.S. Code. As they created an inclusionary discourse deeming Amerasians worthy of American action, guidance, and humanitarian aid, federal policymakers simultaneously initiated exclusionary policies that designated these people unfit for American citizenship.

This striking work of narrative nonfiction tells the true story of six-year-old Sachiko Yasui's survival of the Nagasaki atomic bomb on August 9, 1945, and the heartbreaking and lifelong aftermath. Having conducted extensive interviews with Sachiko Yasui, Caren Stelson chronicles Sachiko's trauma and loss as well as her long journey to find peace. This book offers readers a remarkable new perspective on the final moments of World War II and their aftermath.

An insightful and thorough account of the Arab-Israeli conflict ranges from the birth of Israel to the present day, told from firsthand knowledge of the major characters and events, written by a former high-ranking Israeli official.

Takeyama's writings educate readers about how the war affected ordinary Japanese and convey his thoughts about Japan's ally Germany, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, and the immediate postwar years."--BOOK JACKET.

Takeyama Michio, the author of Harp of Burma, was thirty-seven in 1941, the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Husband, father of children born during the war, and teacher at Japan’s elite school of higher education in Tokyo, he experienced the war on its home front. His essays provide us with a personal record of the bombing of Tokyo, the shortage of food, the inability to get accurate information about the war, the frictions between civilians and military and between his elite students and other civilians, the mobilization of students into factory jobs and the military, and the relocation of civilians out of the Tokyo area. This intimate account of the “scars of war,” including personal anecdotes from Takeyama’s students and family, is one of very few histories from this unique vantage point. Takeyama’s writings educate readers about how the war affected ordinary Japanese and convey his thoughts about Japan's ally Germany, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, and the immediate postwar years. Beautifully translated by Richard H. Minear, these honest and moving essays are a fresh look at the history of Japan during the Asia-Pacific War.

Scars of War examines how the exclusion of mixed-race persons and people of Asian descent in the United States shaped the efforts of policymakers to recognize the Amerasians of Vietnam as American children and initiate legislation that designated them unfit for American citizenship.

Returning Iraq war veteran Ray McKenna struggles with battle scars that can only be healed by love. Ray McKenna returns from the war in Iraq to find that she had attained unwanted celebrity status back home. As the only surviving American soldier of a well-publicized hostage crisis, she is the center of attention at a time when all she wants is solitude. Struggling to overcome the fear and anxiety that plague her, she relies on her psychiatric therapy dog Jagger to help her through the vicious symptoms of PTSD. Veterinarian Dr. Carly Warner hasn't yet figured out how to open her heart to the possibility of falling in love again after the death of her longtime partner. When Ray McKenna walks into the North Coast Veterinary Clinic with Jagger, she and Carly begin a friendship that takes them both by surprise. Brought together by their shared love of dogs, Ray and Carly discover that they are both capable of moving forward, if only they are brave enough to try.