false 28171 1 1 50040 0671787187 9780671787189 50 <![CDATA[We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170366288m/50040.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170366288s/50040.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50040.We_Band_of_Angels_The_Untold_Story_of_American_Nurses_Trapped_on_Bataan_by_the_Japanese 4.20 181 "Found worms in my oatmeal this morning. I shouldn't have objected because they had been sterilized in the cooking and I was getting fresh meat with my breakfast.... I'm still losing weight and so are most of us..."

Ruth Marie Straub, an Army nurse, wrote those words in her diary on March 15, 1942, just over three months after the Japanese first bombed the U.S. military base in Manila. She and her colleagues had evacuated the city and established, in the Philippine jungle, hospitals for the skyrocketing numbers of casualties. In the face of the advancing Japanese Army, the nurses and other military personnel continued to retreat, first to the Bataan Peninsula, and then to Corregidor, a rocky island in Manila Bay. Straub was one of the lucky ones; she was evacuated with a handful of other nurses in April 1942. Her remaining colleagues, meanwhile, surrendered with the rest of the U.S. forces in May and were taken to STIC--Santo Tomas Internment Camp, where they were to spend nearly three years in captivity.

We Band of Angels tells the stories of these courageous women, tagged by the American media as "The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor." Utilizing a wide range of sources, including diaries, letters, and personal interviews with surviving "Angels," Elizabeth M. Norman has compiled a harrowing narrative about the experiences of these women--from the country-club atmosphere of prewar Manila; to the jungle hospitals where patients slept on bamboo cots in the open air; to the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor, where they choked on dust and worked while the bombs rained down above them; to the STIC, where per-person rations were cut to 900 calories a day and the women resorted to frying weeds in cold cream for food. The story Nelson tells is compelling but slightly flawed: like many biographers, Nelson has a deep affection and respect for her subjects, which causes her to soften rough edges. At the same time, however, Nelson argues that these women were not heroes--nor were they angels (in the acknowledgments, Nelson notes that she didn't want the word angels in the title, but the publishers had their way). Perhaps because Nelson is a nurse herself, she is trying to stress that her profession is noble and that these women were, in a sense, just fulfilling their duties.

Nursing is noble, of course, but it is clear that these women were something special. Amazingly, all of the Angels of Bataan, some 99 in number, survived their ordeal--and clearly helped hundreds of the other sufferers survive. We Band of Angels deserves a space on the bookshelves of anyone interested in World War II. --C.B. Delaney

]]> 28171 4.28 268 89 1999 6455003 0374272603 9780374272609 34 <![CDATA[Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255633515m/6455003.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255633515s/6455003.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6455003-tears-in-the-darkness 4.42 71
The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book. From then until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the prisoners of war suffered an ordeal of unparalleled cruelty and savagery: forty-one months of captivity, starvation rations, dehydration, hard labor, deadly disease, and torture far from the machinations of General Douglas MacArthur.

The Normans bring to the story remarkable feats of reportage and literary empathy. Their protagonist, Ben Steele, is a figure out of Hemingway: a young cowboy turned sketch artist from Montana who joined the army to see the world. Juxtaposed against Steele s story and the sobering tale of the Death March and its aftermath is the story of a number of Japanese soldiers.

The result is an altogether new and original World War II book: it exposes the myths of military heroism as shallow and inadequate; it makes clear, with great literary and human power, that war causes suffering for people on all sides.]]> 2932645 4.20 89 43 28171 4.28 268 89 2009 1010896 0812213173 9780812213171 1 <![CDATA[Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180210764m/1010896.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180210764s/1010896.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1010896.Women_at_War_The_Story_of_Fifty_Military_Nurses_Who_Served_in_Vietnam 4.00 4 Norman tells the dramatic story of fifty women--members of the Army, Navy, and Air Force Nurse Corps--who went to war, working in military hospitals, aboard ships, and with air evacuation squadrons during the Vietnam War. Here, in a moving narrative, the women talk about why they went to war, the experiences they had while they were there, and how war affected them physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

]]> 28171 4.28 268 89 1990