They Called Us Enemy - Expanded Edition Written by George Takei, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott. Art by Harmony Becker

Life as a young boy in my the McCoy household centered around three things: Star Trek, sports and World War II movies. I've seen more John Wayne flicks than John Wayne. I knew the names of the bridge crew of the Enterprise before I could name most of my friends parents. And don't get me started on sports or the creative way my own dear father was known to use profanity while watching our local Detroit teams play (and trust me, the man was a master.) It really kind of sucks then that I'm not more excited about sharing an experience that involved both George Takei from ST:TOS and World War II.

Don't get me wrong. They Called Us Enemy by George Takei et al. is actually a very well written and well drawn graphic novel. (I'm going with the name "graphic novel" even though novel implies fiction and They Called Us Enemy is a true story because there is no word or phrase for a comic book that's non-fiction, at least to the best of my knowledge and belief.) I just kind of wish it hadn't been written.

Listen folks, I know that the United States has done some screwed up stuff in its past. I have a BA in History, I've studied a bunch of it. From the Indian Wars (and yes, conquest is common throughout history, but paying a bounty for scalps of your enemies is not) slavery/racism, etc. None of that is good and all of it bothers me, but I can't help but have a special hatred of the internment of Japanese citizens of the United States at at time when Hitler was killing camps full of Jews a little bit worse than the rest of it. Maybe I'm wrong for that, but it is what it is. 

For all of that though, They Called Us Enemy is a well written, entertaining, touching and oddly honest depiction of what George Takei went through when his family was forced into a camp. I say oddly honest because he speaks of train trips from camp to camp almost fondly when I would have expected nothing but vitriol. He also makes a point at the end about Americans being willing to talk about the camps and about the beauty of American democracy even if it does screw up at times. It would have been very easy for him to be much more bitter and he's not. That says a lot about him as a person.

The story is told simply but well. This is not some unreadable treatise by some academic hack. It almost feels like sitting on my grandma's couch cracking nuts and listening to my grandpa tell stories. The writers of this story hit the perfect note. I followed the story from place to place and from event to event easily. Some of it I could readily sympathize with. 

We get a really good look at young George and the Takei family. He does his best to show his readers his parents point of view. His pride in his father's accomplishments and hard work is both obvious and well deserved. His pride in his mother's accomplishments and ingenuity is both of the above as well. Sneaking a forbidden sewing machine into an internment camp was quite the trick and it was every bit as necessary as it must have been frightening to pull off.

The art in the book is simple but beautiful. It's well drawn and pulls the reader in but it's not too much. It's this weird mix of "we need to use the art to tell the story" and "we need to keep the art from getting in the way of the story" and somehow Harmony Becker pulled it off. I don't know how that's possible, but I saw it with my own eyes. Her drawings depict what happened but without any type of an artistic flourish. This was art that was written by someone who was dedicated to sharing a story and not by someone who wanted to show off.

I'll take it one step further: The art in They Called Us Enemy is all in black and white and that was a great choice. I like it for two reasons. One is that I grew up on black and white World War II movies and the monochrome look is not just nostalgic, but it evokes that old world feeling for me. With the lack of color I'm transported to a time that feels familiar even though it was over three decades before I was born. The other reason is a little more complicated, but I'll try to explain it like this:

There are some things that just need to be shown in a somewhat muted manner. I'm not saying they should be silenced, but I am saying that too much color can give a somewhat celebratory mood. No one goes to a fireworks show to see black and white explosions. Patriotic types in the US (and this is a group I belong to) talk about the "red, white, and blue" and not some monochromatic depiction of the American flag. 

Another black and white comic I talked about, Maus, used a black and white color scheme to good effect as well. It is good to keep somber subjects (and the internment of Japanese citizens is certainly something that no one should be proud of) in a darker, more solemn setting. 

I find it necessary to repeat something I said about Maus though: I would be careful giving this type of a comic to a young person, or a classroom full of them, if they didn't have the historical background to go with this. I linked my Maus review earlier. There were some statistics I pointed to at the time regarding the fact that younger people aren't taking the Holocaust as seriously as they should be. I sometimes wonder if that's because of things like comic books about these events. 

I've been told that works like Maus and They Called Us Enemy are the only way to get the emotional impact of their respective events across. That may very well be true. It's also true that most people don't take things they read in comics seriously. I know that Spiegelman and Takei both intended their work to bring attention to important subjects and get a message out. I just hope that their work doesn't accomplish the opposite of what they intended. 

So if you're going to hand a copy of They Called Us Enemy to a young person, make sure you give them some historical background. Make sure that they know this is one family's story and that there were many more families and camps than just the ones in the book. And make sure they know this isn't some made up story. That it actually happened. But read They Called Us Enemy and share it because it's both a good story and an important one. Just do it right.

Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Watch Towers

They Called Us Enemy - Expanded Edition
George Takei, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott. Art by Harmony Becker
Top Shelf Productions, 2019

They Called Us Enemy - Expanded Edition is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

They Called Us Enemy

About the Maus Thing

A school district in Tennessee has banned teaching a graphic novel (That's a fancy term for a really long comic book.) named Maus. Maus is a take on the Holocaust, retelling the story with the Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The school board states that they banned it because of nudity and bad language. 

For the record, I have purchased (and never got around to reading) a copy of the book for myself that I lost in the move when I got divorced and have gifted another copy to my oldest daughter. I also have a BA in History and my senior thesis/capstone paper was written on the involvement of the Heer, the German Army (not to be confused with the Wehrmacht which was the Nazi equivalent to the Department of Defense) in the Holocaust. I have read everything from translations of primary sources in the form of German After Action Reports to transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials to Ordinary Men to various writings of Omer Bartov...

The list goes on. 

Then add to that the fact that, at least according to my father I have some Jewish ancestry (meaning that I am in some way related to every one if the oeople who died in those camps or from the mass shootings), and well...

You'd be hard pressed to find a person who believes more strongly in the importance of Holocaust education than me. I mean that sincerely.

Boobies and bad language happen in the real world and, honestly, you can't accurately recount some events without the atmosphere of profanity and exploitation that those elements add.

And yet...

I'm not a big fan of using things like comic books/Hollywood movies as educational aids to begin with. The amount of historical inaccuracies that creep into one of these works is unreal. I seriously (and I KID YOU NOT) took a course in Japanese history in college in which we read a scholarly paper detailing the historical inaccuracies in The Last Samurai. If I recall correctly, and I may not since it's been awhile, it spanned somewhere in the twenty-five to thirty page range. 

If you've seen Glory, you know that the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts Regiment was not issued uniforms when they first arrived. Of course, what you know is wrong. The Fifty- Fourth most certainly did suffer from racism and discrimination. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or an idiot (possibly both if they think you're dumb enough to believe them) but they got their uniforms. Now, the scene where they're paid a smaller wage and therefore refuse to accept payment is one hundred percent true. It's complicated. We were shown Glory in high school. We all took the work to be one hundred percent accurate. I mean, our teacher showed it to us, right? Except that it wasn't and that has altered our perception of history.

As another example, there was the movie The Tuskegee Airmen. In that movie, we see two senators arguing about the existence of a flight program for black men in the military. The senator from New York (I think, it's been awhile) is in favor of the program. His southern counterpart is not. The debate was real. The two senators depicted in the movie are not. And yes, Eleanor Roosevelt really did fly with one of the Tuskegee Airmen shortly before they deployed to Europe, so that part is real. It gets complicated. The Tuskegee Airmen came out after I graduated from high school, so I'm not sure if it was ever used in a classroom or not. I can only say, that despite viewing the movie so many times that the VHS tape I purchased it on fell apart and was eaten by my VCR, I never saw it in a classroom.

Please, if you value your life don't even mention the phrases "historical accuracy" and "John Wayne movie" in front of a college professor. Since I value mine, DEFINITELY don't mention it if I'm standing between the two of you. If and when I see a real fact in a work featuring John Wayne, I promise to inform you of its existence. Given the fact that my father and grandfather (on my Mom's side) were both John Wayne fanatics I've seen a lot but I'm not able to name one movie that got anything right. Actually, that's not technically true. There really were Green Berets in Vietnam. Granted, they called THEMSELVES, US Army Special Forces...

Anyway...

I cannot comment on the historical accuracy and inaccuracies in Maus because I haven't read it other than the obvious. Jews and Nazis were both human beings and not animals. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot more than inaccuracies than just that and I'm pretty sure your average junior high school student is smart enough to know that. And yes, I am aware that Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, based his work on interviews with his grandfather. That doesn't make them one hundred percent copies though, and I'm not sure I trust this book to get it right. 

The Left, of course, is screaming racism because that is what the left does. The problem with the Left and their Critical Social Theory (which encompasses Critical Race theory but also things like the LGBT and Feminist movements) is that they refuse to consider causes outside of race, gender, orientation, etc. When they refuse to consider causes outside of those bounds then everything is going to come up either -ist or -phobic. That's just life. Considering whether nudity and profanity are proper fare for a junior high audience would never have crossed their mind because they are blind to even understanding the argument, let alone evaluating it.

So, while I believe in Freedom of Speech and the Press, I don't believe that a persons right to say or right something entitles them to have their works used as a teaching aid. We wouldn't use a movie stating that there is no need to balance equations in either an algebra or chemistry class because of Freedom of Speech. And so, what I'm actually saying here is that I'm not sure Maus was the correct book to be teaching to kids anyway. It should've been left in the library for a curious student to find if they went looking later. It was, after all, watching John Wayne movies with all their inaccuracies that led me to love history in the first place. There are factual works that could have been used to teach the Holocaust Unit. So, for my money, I'd prefer that Maus and other works of historical fiction be kept out of classrooms, even if I have praised them previously.

Maus
Art Spiegelman
Pantheon, 1986

Maus and related works are available for purchase at the links below. If you click the links and buy literally anything from Amazon I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

Kacey Ezell's Minds of Men

(Due to the fact that I pretty much suck at life, Kacey Ezell got left out of my Memorial Day promotion featuring works written by veterans of the United States Armed Forces and featuring the US Military in action. I didn't get word to her quickly enough and by the time she inquired about submitting, I didn't have time to read and review the book. My fault, not hers. My bad, Kacey. At any rate, Kacey is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy (class of 99). She flew the UH-1N and Mi-17 helicopters. She had at least one deployment to a war zone, that being Iraq.)

Psst.... Hey, you. The one reading the blog. I see you there. You think I'm talking to someone else. Listen, I need you to work with here, okay? I'm about to share with a review about a book named Minds of Men by Kacey Ezell. But uhh... well...

*Jim looks over both shoulders*

It's umm... Alternate history. And I've got a history degree. And if one of my old professors were to find out that I read a book that they'd consider to be historical fiction, I'd be in deep doo-doo. If they found out I enjoyed it, I'd be in even deeper doo-doo. And if they found out I featured it on my blog and encouraged others to read it, I'd get to find out if it was possible to impeach me and take my degree away. So, I mean, yeah, Minds of Men kicks ass, but if you talk to any history professors from Oakland University (where I got my BA) especially, or Wayne State University (where I did some graduate work but never finished) then you didn't hear how good this book was from me. K? I mean, you can still say you read and enjoyed it if you don't mind the inevitable backlash. Just don't tell them it's my fault. I've got kids.

On the other hand, Minds of Men is a really excellent book. Kacey did a great job of creating a world where things are close enough to be recognizable but just far enough away to be considered fiction. She sucked me into this thing quickly. I really did enjoy the premise of this story. It gets going and doesn't stop. Ezell knew what she was doing when she wrote this. This is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, her first published novel, but it doesn't read like it was written by a rookie. It's entertaining as hell and holds together well.

The premise of the book is that some very few rare women are able to communicate telepathically. By using this ability they can effectively create a network among people. The Women's Army Corps recruits twenty of these women to send on bomber missions during World War Two in Europe. They end up flying in B-17s. This results in faster communication and saves lives and improves accuracy. The real joy of the book is in the characters as always, but the telepathic networking is what holds the story together and it is fascinating.

I have to say this: In order for the premise of the book to work, you have to give Ezell about ten pages or so. It's not a lot and it makes more sense once you see what they're doing in action. I was a bit skeptical at first. I mean, radio was in common use by every side in World War Two. I didn't see how telepathic communication would be any faster or work any better. I kept reading though and I'm glad I did. The difference between radio and psychic networking is the difference between dial up internet and a gigabit connection. It just takes a bit of patience to let the characters explain it to you. Oh, and without going into massive amounts of spoilers, let's just say that networking isn't the only thing these ladies are capable of. Seriously, read the book if you want to learn what all they can do. There is an awful lot there and almost all of it makes sense.

Minds of Men is well named. It turns out that they psychic women can bond better with men, even though (or maybe because for all I know) men don't have psychic ability. Our heroine, Evelyn "Evie" Adamsen, bonds psychically with her crew (and yes, she becomes as much a part of the crew as any of the men because she earns it) and goes through hell on Earth with them. Seriously. I've often thought (as someone with zero combat experience) that in all of the wars in history and all of the places that humans have fought and all of the specialties of the people who have fought, the worst job literally ever would be to end up hanging in the sky over Europe in a plane flying straight and level about to drop bombs with nowhere to hide and no way to dodge. Knowing that someone is trying to kill me would be bad enough. Making it easy for them so that I can get my job done is probably a bit more than I could get through. Evie does it though, and so does her crew.

There is more to Minds of Men than simply bomber missions though. I don't want to spoil the book, so I'll just say that possibly the most harrowing part of the work doesn't happen in the sky. Ezell, having been a pilot herself, shows us what I would expect most pilots nightmares to look like. This aircrew goes through some bad stuff. They come out of it okay-ish though, and a lot of that has to do with Evie herself. Her gifts save them all.

Speaking of Evie, she's a damn well written character. I watched part of a video earlier today about the problems with women in fiction. The vlogger (whose name I don't remember and am too lazy to go look up) spoke about a dichotomy between the wilting violet type and the utter badass type. Weak feminine characteristics versus masculine women. Evie is neither. She doesn't straight up bitchslap dudes, and she doesn't just fold up and die and wait for the men to come and rescue her. Evie uses her abilities and keeps her guys alive but she is not the physical threat that some women are, despite differences in muscle mass and size that most women would face in the real world. I really enjoyed her.

Oh, and the cover says it's book one of The Psyche of War. That means we've got more coming from Ms. Ezell. I'm stoked. This is some seriously good stuff and I'm in for the next one. Whenever it gets here. Of course, I'd never be that fan and actually bother an author about when the next one's coming. I wouldn't dare tell someone to shut up and take my money or anything. That's just not me.

Now, I guess it's time for the disclaimer: If you're a feminazi who can't stand the thought that a woman might need some help from a man at some point in her life then maybe this isn't the perfect book for you. Conversely, if you're a whiner who wants to pretend that a female MC is some kind of political statement, like the guys who whined about the women in the new Mad Max, maybe you should spend some time doing manly stuff instead. I mean, it does include members of the Women's Army Corps. So, if you're a whiny little bitch on either side of the line then, assuming you can't develop the maturity to handle a good book based on its merits and not your politics, I would suggest something else. On the other hand, if you have at least as much mental and emotional maturity as the average eight year old, buy this book and read it.

Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Stars

Minds of Men
Kacey Ezell
Theogony Books, 2017

Minds of Men is available for purchase at the following link:

James Young's Acts of War

It's almost Memorial Day here in the States and what is a SF/F reviewer to do? How about reviewing an alternate history set in World War II? It works for me and I am, after all, the blog owner. Maybe next year I'll do some space marines, but this year it's James Young's Acts of War. Oh, and yes, Alt Hist IS a facet of SF, at least on this blog. Honestly, I may be cheating a bit because I love Alt Hist but it most definitely has a speculative quality to it and the S in SF/F often does refer to Speculative right? So yes, this stuff has a home on my blog and this was a good one to start on. When Young asked me to review this, he specifically asked if I considered alternate history to be SF, so I thought I'd mention it. I never knew there was a controversy here. I mean, I've been finding my Harry Turtledove books in the SF section for almost twenty years now.

Acts of War takes place in a world where Germany forced Great Britain into an armistice before the United States enter World War II. This somehow results from the umm, "accidental" isn't quite the word I'm looking for but it will have to do, death of Adolf Hitler when a British Bomber dropped a bomb on him. Changes in Germany's government led to the gassing of London by the Luftwaffe. Germany uses the "peace" to rearm. Britain does nothing to improve its military. Japan is talked out of antagonizing the United States and doesn't bomb Pearl Harbor until spring of 1942. New countries join the Axis. Things look bleak for the United States, which is fighting the war with only the members of the British Commonwealth at its side.

Under no circumstances would I present myself as an expert in naval warfare, but I have done a lot of reading (both fiction and non-fiction) on the subject. Some of the earliest history I read on my own were non-fiction accounts of World War II naval battles and I'm a huge fan of David Weber and others who have written works of fiction that include naval combat. Tora Tora Tora and Midway were both movies that I have watched many times and own on DVD. They're both entertaining and have been praised by experts on the period for the historical accuracy.  That much being said, the battle sequences in this book are pretty epic. Young has clearly done more studying on the subject than I have and it shows. When he tells the story of a battle it all hangs together and just works. I could picture the shooting, the explosions, the bombs falling, the torpedoes moving toward the water and the gruesome injuries cause by all of the above.

Young also shows the best and worst of the US military. His heroes are heroic. More than one of them gets decorated and it's not hard to believe it. They fight hard. Some of the others, well... Every military force has members that have gotten their position through politics and family connections and Young's US Navy is no exception. The good news is that at least one of the bastards gets precisely what he deserved. The other good news is that Young managed to make me hate that guy badly enough to want him dead. An author's job is to provoke an emotional response and he has done that.

 The family ties in the book are excellent and something that I've often seen left out of this type of story. The majority of the tome follow the exploits of the Cobb family, many of which appear as members of the military. Their sister is also a central figure, as are many of their girlfriends. The romances don't always go as planned, but that's something we've all lived through, military or not. The effects of war on those left behind gets heavy treatment and that's a good thing.

Not everything here is wine and roses though. There are a few things which honestly confuse me. For one, the point of historical departure (that's where an Alternate History story diverges from the real world timeline) takes place in Europe when Hitler dies, but most of the action centers on the war in the Pacific. Either way works but both together creates a cognitive dissonance for me. After the first twenty or so pages Europe gets mentioned only sparingly and is nearly forgotten until a briefing near the end of the book. I just don't get that. Also, there are times when the portions of the book that don't involve combat drag a bit. It definitely gets better the longer the book goes on, but it's there. There is also a huge twist regarding the British government that doesn't get resolved and seems to be beside the main thrust of the book. Oddly enough, this volume reads almost like two separate books to me as well, with the run up to the start of war being one story and the prosecution of it afterward reading like another one. Don't get me wrong, they're both enjoyable but I remember being about halfway through this thing thinking that there was a mistake in the page count on my Nook.

Acts of War appears destined for a sequel and I'm hoping that when it comes it will clear some of this up. AoW is the second in a series and appears to be setting up something bigger to come. I want to read it because I'm hoping that a lot of what got left out here will find its way into the new one. There are a lot of threads left hanging at the end of this one and I can't wait to see Young tie them up.

Bottom line: 4.25 out of 5 sinking battleships

Acts of War
James Young
Createspace, 2014

This work can be purchased here: