This is a short, accessible biography of Elaine Black Yoneda, a Jewish radical labor and political activist, wife, and mother who voluntarily entered the Manzanar Relocation Camp with her Japanese American husband and son during World War II. The book’s great virtue is that it offers narratives that illuminate early twentieth-century immigration, labor activism, and left-wing politics before and during the Great Depression, and the experiences of those interned at Manzanar. Its great weakness is that it claims to be a feminist biography but too often fails to completely investigate the historical record as other more noteworthy feminist biographies have.The introduction exhaustively reviews the scholarship concerning early twentieth-century immigration, left-wing labor activism during the first half of the twentieth century in California, and the history of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans (also during the first half of the twentieth century). It also analyzes approaches to feminist biography. The historian may find this introduction interesting and informative, but the advanced high school student or undergraduate at whom the book seems to be aimed will find it tedious.After the introduction, the book is divided into five sections, each containing multiple short chapters—organized “spatially” (14), based on the geographic locations where Yoneda lived her life. The first section contextualizes her background within the immigration of Eastern European Jews to the East Coast of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her parents were immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe. They had been socialist labor activists in Russia and continued that work in New York, eventually joining the Communist Party. They moved to Southern California in 1920, when Elaine was fourteen, and later settled in the multiethnic neighborhood of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. Though her parents remained politically active, Elaine’s own political evolution as an activist was gradual: “However much she disclaimed any sympathy with her parents’ politics, glimmers of class consciousness began to emerge” (36). A run-in with the notorious LAPD “Red Squad,” a brutal group of police who attacked communists and union organizers, proved to be the catalyst that finally drew her in as a left-wing activist. She went to work for International Labor Defense (ILD), a group that offered support to labor activists who were arrested, on trial, or imprisoned for their work. Meanwhile, she had married, had a daughter, got divorced, and moved to San Francisco in 1933 with her soon-to-be second husband, Karl Yoneda, a Japanese American union organizer and journalist. Elaine continued her work with the ILD while Karl worked as a longshoreman and organizer along the waterfront. The author’s recounting of 1930s labor and political activism in California on farms, in factories, and on the waterfronts is one of the book’s strongest parts. Karl and Elaine were in the midst of it all. Their son Tommy was born in 1939. Then came the war.The story of anti-Japanese racism on the West Coast, especially after Pearl Harbor, is a key element of Elaine’s story. By the time Executive Order 9066 authorized the relocation of all persons deemed a threat to national security in February 1942, Karl had voluntarily gone to work at the site near Independence, California, where Manzanar, the most famous of the so-called relocation camps, was being constructed (Schreiber prefers the term concentration camp). Elaine and Tommy would join him soon thereafter, beginning the most unusual and interesting part of Elaine’s story. Though confined in a concentration camp, they embraced the Popular Front attitude that defeating fascism took priority over everything. Behind barbed wire for less than a year, the Yonedas experienced the full and complicated story of life at Manzanar. Karl would join the army as soon as it was permitted, and Tommy’s poor health would enable Elaine to leave the camp by December 1942.After the war, Karl and Elaine would take up chicken ranching near Petaluma, California, along with a community of socialists and communists. They endured the McCarthy era and eventually wound up back in San Francisco. They remained active in politics and labor, though not with the intensity of their previous commitments. They nevertheless played key roles in the campaign for redress of the deprivation of the rights of Japanese Americans during the war, as well as in the campaign to memorialize Manzanar as a state and federal landmark. Elaine died of a heart attack in 1988.Elaine Black Yoneda wonderfully weaves the narrative of Yoneda’s exuberant life into many key historical movements, with a particular focus on the West Coast and California. Schreiber does a fine job of informing the reader on historical questions about race, capitalism, labor relations, economic justice, and the roles of women, both in adversity and in triumph, by weaving those questions into the life stories of Yoneda and her family. The connection to this elegant, feisty, and courageous woman personalizes the history and makes it more accessible.For the historian, however, it is problematic that the author often relies too heavily on the oral histories and memoirs of Elaine and Karl. Footnotes supporting some significant swaths of the narrative come entirely from these sources, without further verification. For example, the book recounts Elaine’s arrest and trial for disturbing the peace and inciting a riot at a 1935 rally in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores Park (86–91). The narrative features a number of remarkable details: Elaine reciting the Bill of Rights to the crowd as she urges them to keep the police from arresting another activist; Elaine tangling with the judge and prosecutor and quoting from her summary argument in defense of herself. Nearly all of this story is based on a previous biography of Elaine or is from Elaine’s own oral history. There is no supporting documentation from court records, contemporary newspapers, or other observers. Other feminist biographies, like Patricia Cline Cohen’s The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York or Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt, demonstrate a zeal for cross-referencing the historical record that Elaine Black Yoneda could have used more of.That notwithstanding, the book could serve as an excellent pedagogical tool for the advanced high school student or undergraduate. Its personalization of so many of the key historical events of twentieth-century U.S. history and the history of California make it an easy read, full of information. The historian or the fan of historical writing should take some of the material with half a grain of salt, while at the same time appreciating this portrait of a remarkable woman.