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    Dear Miss Breed
    Dear Miss Breed
    Dear Miss Breed
    Audiobook4 hours

    Dear Miss Breed

    Written by Joanne Oppenheim

    Narrated by Andrea Gallo

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    After Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor, over 100,000 Japanese Americans were ordered to leave their homes. The government was afraid that because they looked like "the enemy," they might be spies. One American, librarian Clara Breed, was heartbroken and outraged. As the San Diego Public Library's Children's Librarian, Miss Breed was close to many of the children who were evacuated. She went to the train station the day they left, handing out postcards and telling them to send her letters. During the years the children were in camps, she sent letters, books, supplies, and treats. She became someone the children could count on and someone they could talk to outside the crowded, dirty camps. Award-winning author Joanne Oppenheim was inspired to write this story after being reunited with a childhood Japanese American friend who was evacuated. "... deserves commendation for its sheer quantity of accessible, exhaustively researched information about a troubling period, more resonant now than ever, when American ideals were compromised by fear and unfortunate racial assumptions."-Booklist, starred review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 9, 2014
    ISBN9781470356699
    Dear Miss Breed
    Author

    Joanne Oppenheim

    Joanne Oppenheim is the author of more than fifty books for and about children. She lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for Dear Miss Breed

    4/5

    39 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Great book on a schoolteacher who kept in touch with her Japanese-American students who were sent off to detention camps during WW II.
    • 4/5
      This book is based on real life letters between students interned during World War II and their librarian. It's a great demonstration of compassion in the face of trauma and injustice. I love this book because it acts as a reminder to be sensitive to the victims of conflict and mistreatment based on their ethnicity.
    • 3/5
      A unique perspective on the Japaneses interment, told from the letters of children and teens written to a librarian in San Diego. I enjoyed the letters and hearing the first hand accounts from the children. On the down side, the author does a bit too much sermonizing at certain points, I'd prefer to let the letters just speak for them selves. Also, a minor point, the book is rather oversized which makes it not so convenient.
    • 4/5
      The focus of this book is an in depth look a WWII internment camps through the eyse of a t a young female librarian and the relationship she fostered with the children whom she had served that were "relocated" into internment camps for those of Japanese ancestry on the West coast. The majority of the book depicts the experiences of the children and their relationship with the librarian through the publication of letters written to their beloved Miss Breed. It is a one way conversation as Miss Breed's letters to them have not survived. The author enhances this information with a history of the internment program and Miss Breed's efforts to publicize the inequal and racist policies of this program. As a student pursuing a Masters in Library Science, I recommend this book for all future librarians to remind us of the far-reaching role of a librarian - that by serving information needs, we also are serving human needs. I also recommend this book for students in middle and high school studying the aspects of US history that involve: prejudice, government injustice, the holocaust. The voices of the children will make this book meaningful and easy to read and gives a different perspective not often heard.
    • 3/5
      Susan says: This book was part of my Children’s Literature class that I took last fall, and I never got around to reading it. I thought it would be really interesting because it talked about a librarian from San Diego, and Japanese Americans who were in an internment camp in Arizona. A shorter book might have been of more interest. As it is, this is a history of this specific group of San Diegans during WWII, and their history in the camps, mainly at Poston. It is extremely thorough, but I am not sure who the target audience would be. While I think kids could use it for research, I think there are not many children of the right age who are actually doing projects on this. I also had problems with the tone quite often – Oppenheim really castigates the government for calling things having to do with the Japanese Americans protective custody, when really the government believed they were protecting the rest of the Americans. I think we all know this was wrong, and it felt like she was injecting her personal bias into the history. I can imagine that this book is very popular in San Diego, but it took me over a week to read, and it did drag on.
    • 3/5
      An interesting, though sprawling, book about children in the Japanese internment camps during WWII and one librarian who kept in touch with many of them. Many photos are included along with letters from children in the camps. A great book to look through, but it's very long and not very focused, so I ended up skimming the second half of it. This would be a nice companion book to a more concise history of the internment camps.
    • 5/5
      oral history of the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII