This summer, Christopher Nolan’s humane and harrowing blockbuster “Dunkirk” is reviving history buffs’ obsessions and introducing a new generation to World War II.

Here are three new books, each with a Hawaii connection, that bring the war up close and personal.

“MY LIFE’S JOURNEY: A MEMOIR”

Ted T. Tsukiyama (Watermark Publishing, $17.95)

Hawaii-born Ted Tsukiyama, 96, graduated from Roosevelt High School and was a student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He joined the Hawaii Territorial Guard, only to be dismissed, along with other Japanese-Americans, a month later. As he notes in the preface to his new memoir, “Nationally, we were a despised minority who were of the same ancestry as the enemy.”

Within this minority, he observes, experience was widely varied. For instance, many Hawaii Nisei were raised on racially segregated plantations “with the (Caucasians) always lodged at the top,” fostering a sense of inferiority and resentment.

“In contrast, my experience growing up in a racially mixed, middle-class neighborhood like Kaimuki, which included a lot of (Caucasians), I always assumed that I was just as good,” he writes.

But despite their different backgrounds, Hawaii Nisei came together to prove their loyalty and fight for the country they loved. The war provided those who survived with educational opportunities that propelled their reshaping of Hawaii politics and society.

A member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team during the war, he served in Army Intelligence in Burma, a place he came to love for “its savage geography, wild beauty and wonderful people.” Tsukiyama went on to graduate from Indiana University and became the first Japanese-American to enroll at Yale Law School. While practicing law in Honolulu, he was invited by labor lawyer and future Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Edward Nakamura to become an arbitrator for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s contract with the pineapple industry, a post previously held exclusively by Caucasians.

Perhaps his practice of cultivating bonsai informed the patience and discipline that enabled Tsukiyama to compress his eventful life story into a slender but eloquent book. True to his community, his book remembers the many others who fought with him for a better world in times of war and peace.

“SAFE PASSAGE: THE CIVILIAN EVACUATION FROM HAWAII AFTER PEARL HARBOR”

James F. Lee (The Finch Press, $12.99)

James Lee wasn’t yet born, but his mother, Doris, and 2-year-old half sister, Andrea, were living at the Pearl Harbor naval base when his mother’s first husband, Andrew Marze, was killed in the Dec. 7, 1941 attack.

Born in 1952, Lee lives in Virginia and works as a freelance journalist. His articles include a 2012 feature in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about the SS Coolidge, which transported American civilians, his mother and sister among them, from Honolulu back to the mainland in the aftermath of the attack.

“Safe Passage,” motivated by the desire to learn more about his mother’s early life, also tells the stories of many other families in a conscientiously reported history whose structure, alternating between different civilians’ points of view, recalls John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.”

He’s also good on the opportunism of politics. “On the mainland, the returning evacuees (40,000 in all) were often treated as celebrities or heroes,” Lee writes. The stories of their “chins-up” attitude were used for military public relations “to rally the public and urge greater sacrifice on the home front.” The military government in Hawaii, he further writes, was eager to get rid of extra mouths to feed.

A chapter examining the lives and interactions of military and resident families in Hawaii before the war provides a window into the enculturation of families like the Marzes, who found a “more racially integrated” society than they had known in Massachusetts: When she lived off base in Honolulu, Lee’s mother’s best friend was of Korean descent.

“THE JERSEY BROTHERS: A MISSING NAVAL OFFICER IN THE PACIFIC AND HIS FAMILY’S QUEST TO BRING HIM HOME”

Sally Mott Freeman (Simon & Schuster, $28)

In a book reminiscent of “Saving Private Ryan,” Sally Mott Freeman tells the true story of four siblings who served in World War II, with a focus on the family’s efforts to learn the fate of the youngest brother, her uncle Barton Cross, who was taken prisoner in the Philippines by the Japanese in 1942. After seeing him in a family photo as a handsome blade in a New York bar, it is hard to read of his final hours, when he “reached the limits of human endurance.”

His brother Benny served on the USS Enterprise. Brother Bill, the author’s father, saw multiple postings, including a stint in the White House Map Room and helping coordinate the invasion of Saipan, during which he contracted pneumonia and was brought to the naval hospital in Aiea.

Sister Rosemary worked at Brooklyn Navy Yard, and mother Helen carried on a long correspondence with President Franklin Roosevelt, her tone moving from cordial to angry as thousands of American prisoners continued to languish, tortured and starved, in Japanese camps.

Alternating, much like “Dunkirk,” between different characters and scenes, Freeman’s moving first book sweeps the reader through the vast, politically complex reaches of the Pacific war.