Download Silent Honor AudioBook Free

In her 38th bestselling novel, Danielle Steel creates a powerful, moving portrayal of families divided, lives shattered and a nation torn apart by prejudice during a shameful episode in recent American history.

A man ahead of his time, Japanese college or university professor Masao Takashimaya of Kyoto had a passion for modern ideas that was as strong as his wife's belief in ancient traditions. It had been the first 1920s and Masao had dreams for the future—and a desire for the politics and opportunities of a world that was changing every day. Two decades later, his eighteen-year-old daughter Hiroko, torn between her mother's traditions and her father's wishes, boarded the SS Nagoya Maru to come to California for an education and also to make her father proud. It had been August 1941.

From the ship, she went right to the Palo Alto home of her uncle, Takeo, and his family. To Hiroko, California was a different world—a world of barbeques, station wagons and college. Her cousins in California had are more American than Japanese. And much to Hiroko's surprise, Peter Jenkins, her uncle's assistant at Stanford, became an urgent link between her old world and her new. However in spite of him, and all her promises to her father, Hiroko longs to go home. At college or university in Berkeley, her world is rapidly and unexpectedly filled up with prejudice and fear.

On December 7, Pearl Harbor is bombed by japan. Within hours, war is declared and suddenly Hiroko has become an enemy in a foreign land. Terrified, begging to go home, she actually is nonetheless ordered by her father to stay. He is positive she will be safer in California than at home, as well as for a short time she is—until her entire world caves in.

On February 19, Executive Order 9066 is signed by President Roosevelt, giving the military the power to remove japan from other communities at will. Takeo and his family are given ten days to market their home, quit their jobs, and are accountable to a relocation center, along with thousands of other Japanese and Japanese Americans, to handle their destinies there. Families are divided, people are forced to abandon their homes, their businesses, their freedom, and their lives. Hiroko and her uncle's family go first to Tanforan, and after that to the detention center at Tule Lake. This extraordinary novel tells what happened to them there, building a portrait of human tragedy and strength, divided loyalties and love. It tells of Americans who have been treated as foreigners in their own land. And it tells Hiroko's story, and that of her American family, as they fight to stay alive amid the drama of life and death in the camp at Tule Lake.

With clear, powerful prose, Danielle Steel portrays not only the human cost of this terrible amount of time in history, but also the remarkable courage of a people whose honor and dignity transcended the chaos that surrounded them. Set against a vivid backdrop of war and change, her thirty-eighth bestselling novel is both living history and outstanding fiction, revealing the stark truth about the betrayal of Americans by their own government...and the triumph of a woman caught between cultures and determined to survive.

Category: Historical