About the Author:
Author/designer MacKinnon Simpson has been a writer since getting an A on a "What I did on my Summer Vacation" report in 3rd grade. That two-room school , in Pottersville, N.J., was a mile's walk down a dirt road from the tiny family farm in the hollow where he grew up. As a kid, he'd spend winter evenings hanging out in the shadows back of the pot belly stove at Lindaberry's General Store - a coal-burning cast iron stove whose silhouette bore a striking resemblance to storekeeper George C. Lindaberry. The hot stove was a magnet for old-timers - farmers and townsmen alike - reminiscing on good crops and bad, blizzards and droughts, shivarees and shotgun weddings, muskrat traplines and the occasional jacked-out-of-season twelve-point buck. An alumnus of that little school in Pottersville, and later Newark Academy and Princeton, along the way Simpson acquired a reverence for traditions and history and memories that has remained with him through some four decades - and 20-plus book projects - in the Islands. He has been collecting ideas, stories, and images for Hawaii Homefront for decades and also recently finished USS Arizona: Warship, Tomb, Monument, also for Bess Press. Simpson's two previous books each won the Historic Preservation Honor Award presented by Historic Hawai'i Foundation.
From School Library Journal:
Adult/High School—This volume looks like those inviting, intriguing Library of Congress books in the Children's Room (presidents, Civil War, etc.) with a lot of photographs interspersed with just enough text. But it is really geared to older readers seeking extensive information, with illustrations. Drawing on the resources of "Hawai'i's archivists, curators, and librarians," especially the Hawaii War Records Depository, Simpson takes the approach of the islands becoming both a "war front and a home front." He offers extensive detail about the period in six chapters that have an array of sidebars and archival photographs (at least one per spread), with typewriter-style captions reminiscent of the 1940s. The scope is huge, covering Pearl Harbor, life for civilians, military maneuvers, the Red Cross, the problems Japanese Americans experienced, Admiral Nimitz, and much more. Many newspaper articles and full-color ads are reprinted, so the visuals are great. More than 20 pages of "wartime faces" (various military and civilian folk) are included toward the end. The index includes given names but not subjects, events, places, or themes. A goldmine for those interested in this aspect of World War II history, particularly Asian-American or Pacific Islander students.—Linda Beck, Indian Valley Public Library, Telford, PA
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