They Called Us Enemy

by George Takei

The New York Times bestselling graphic memoir from actor/author/activist George Takei returns in a deluxe hardcover edition with bonus material! Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

Now with sixteen pages of bonus content from George Takei and his co-creators: a new afterword plus a behind-the-scenes tour of the process of researching, writing, drawing, and promoting They Called Us Enemy, featuring historical documents, scripts, sketches, photos, and more!

George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his magnetic performances, sharp wit, and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.

In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.

They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.

What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins cowriters Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.

• ISBN10: 1603094709
• ISBN13: 9781603094702
• Publish Date: 25 August 2020 (first published 16 July 2019)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Top Shelf Productions
• Edition: Expanded Edition
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 224
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781603094702

Reviews

[lovelybookshelf]

Rounding up innocent people and putting them in internment camps is horrifying enough, but the way the incarceration of Japanese Americans in WWII came about and was carried out was even more disturbing, and reached much deeper, than I realized. This was not covered in my history classes as a student, so I learned a lot and enjoyed the graphic memoir format. Although Takei's perspective felt overly optimistic at times, it was also encouraging.