• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2020 December #2
  Located in north-central Wyoming, Heart Mountain was one of 10 inland "relocation camps" where West Coast–based Japanese Americans were interned following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. And, yes, while the football teams of high-school-age incarcerees from Heart Mountain would dominate their local public-school rivals—and the author profiles the games and the stars of those teams—their story pales beside that of how they and their fellow Japanese Americans would end up there, which Pearson meticulously details, from their pre–Pearl Harbor lives to the evolution of U.S. policy that created the camps, uprooted these wholly Americanized families, and shamelessly drafted young men from the camps to fight the war—and to the resistance to the draft that many of them mounted (arguing that they should be granted their civil rights first), for which they were jailed. It might not have the sports appeal of most "local team makes good" stories, but Pearson's account will fill gaps in readers' understanding of this unsavory chapter in American history. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.

Bradford Pearson is the former features editor of Southwest: The Magazine. He has written for The New York Times, Esquire, Time, and Salon, among many other publications. He grew up in Hyde Park, New York, and now lives in Philadelphia. The Eagles of Heart Mountain is his first book.