Last Gasp Brings the Lessons of 'Barefoot Gen' to Schools
The Barefoot Gen for Schools and Libraries Kickstarter is a two-pronged attack on complacency — three, if you count the example it sets in itself. Aiming to 1) get classic comic literature into classrooms and 2) educate American children about the tragedy in their nation’s debt to Japan, Last Gasp is running a campaign to print four thousand hardcover copies of Nakazawa Kenji’s Barefoot Gen. Nakazawa lived through the devastation of Hiroshima in 1945, and thirty years later he turned his experiences into a story about a little boy who lives an ordinary life — and then keeps on living, when all ordinariness disappears, and his peers and family fall victim to atomic warfare.