Baseball Saved Us

A: Baseball Saved Us
B: Mochizuki, Ken
C: Lee, Dom
D: Lee and Low Books Inc, 1993
E: Multicultural Picture book
F: K-2
G: This book starts inside of a Japanese interment camp. A boy and his father are looking at an empty lot and his father decides that they need a baseball field to keep their sanity while in the camp. The boy then has a flash back to life outside of the camp and how they got to the camp. Once at the camp, the children started to act with disrespect, even his older brother started to act bad towards his father. The story then catches up to the future and picks up the men of the camp building the baseball field and the women making uniforms. They then played baseball on the field and the main charter started out bad, but started to get a lot better. In the final game he hit a home run to win the game. The book ends with the boy back at home after leaving camp. He had no friends, but was on the baseball team. He hit another homerun to win the game.
H: This book was a very well planned out book. I also feel that it would be a great way to introduce interment camps to younger students. On the surface this book would not be as moving unless you were aware of the conditions faced by the Japanese during the war. I thought the illustrations were unique. They were very vivid, but they also left a lot to the imagination. I really liked this book, the whole feeling of it has the same feeling of Weedflower; a novel about the Japanese interment camps.
I: This book would be a great book the teach children in K-1 about baseball and the importance of acceptance. About how you should not single someone out because they are different. I would also use this book in the second grade to teach what internment camps were and why they were wrong. I think that this is information that more students should have contact with.