Book Review of
The Eagles of Heart Mountain

Lynn's Review

The Eagles of Heart Mountain by Bradford Pearson was published in 2021. It is WWII Nonfiction and was 397 pages.

The subtitle of this book is A true story of football, incarceration, and resistance in WWII America. The fact that football was in the subtitle made me think that this book would contain a lot about football during WWII, which is not something that I know a lot about.

However, the football team was not really talked about until page 200. Even then the rest of the book did not focus a lot of football.

Most of the book was taken up talking about the players and where they came from, but also about a lot of other people. I found the first 200 pages a bit scattered. I almost quit the book several times. 

I am glad I didn’t stop reading it, but the first 200 pages were a bit of a struggle to get through. This might be partially due to the fact that over the last couple of years, I have read quite a few books on the Japanese Internment Camps during WWII. One of them Facing the Mountain was one of my favorite books that I read last year. Facing the Mountain made history come alive. 

So a lot of the information in The Eagles of Heart Mountain was information that I already knew. It wasn’t new to me. I might have enjoyed the first 200 pages more if I had not read so many other books similar to it and was written in a way that made history come alive. 

That being said, I do think that the story of the Japanese Americans who were sent to Internment camps needs to be told. For far too long this part of history has been hidden. Few people knew about it. I see the importance of books like this and for that, I am grateful that I read it.