Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath
by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman
Published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux
Copyright 2009

Excerpted from www.fsgbooks.com

Tears in the Darkness is a major new book about World War II, in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front and Hiroshima. For the first four months of 1942, American, Filipino, and Japanese soldiers fought what was to become America's first major land battle of World War II: the battle for the tiny Philippine peninsula of Bataan. The brutal fight ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history.

The Normans bring to this story remarkable feats of reportage and literary empathy. Their protagonist, Ben Steele, is a figure out of Hemingway: a young cowboy and aspiring sketch artist from Montana who joined the army to see the world and ended up on a death march, and worse. In the end, his is a story that goes beyond survival, a story of how one man's abiding humanity sustained him.

Michael Norman, a former reporter for The New York Times and a Marine Corps combat veteran of Vietnam, is now a professor of journalism at New York University. He is the author of These Good Men: Friendships Forged from War, a memoir.

Elizabeth Norman, author of Women at War: the Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam and We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese, is a professor of humanities at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

The drawings that appear throughout the book are taken from the sketchbooks of Ben Steele and were made during his six decades as an artist and teacher of art in Billings, Montana.

OOV Bookshelf 2009

AUGUST 2009 FEATURE Butete: The Story of a Remarkable Fish / The Song of Tampopo by Asela Hazel Z. Gundaya Give Your English the Winning Edge by Jose Carillo America's Second-Class Veterans by Rick Rocamora and Rene P. Ciria-Cruz Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman The Long Lost Startle Poems by Joel Toledo