Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (Hardcover)

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by Michael Norman

Review & Details

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Customer Reviews

"Surprisingly Great Read"

By Charles H. Perle (Jersey City, New Jersey)

This book may be history, but it reads like a novel. The authors have obviously done a lot of interviewing- more than 400- and it really shows. They have woven a story that's hard to put down. My only knowledge of the "Bataan Death March' was from the movies. This is some story. They take you to the Philippines before the battle and set the stage for it. Then they take you into the battle itself, right into the action. It's like you are there with the men. Then comes the surrender on April 9, 1942, 76,0000 men under American command, the biggest military defeat in our history. Then comes the death march. I think it's the longest chapter in the book. It was both hard to read and hard to stop reading. The details that these writers have accumulated are just unbelievable. You can see the work that went into this. Two things I especially like. First, although there must be literally more than a hundred characters in this book, they keep coming back to touch base with one character, a guy named Ben Steele, who was a young cowboy who grew up in Montana. His story really drew me in and I liked following him from the first page to the last. He became an artist after the war, and a many of his sketches, from that time in his life, are in the book. Surprisingly, I enjoyed reading about some of the Japenese soldiers. What's interesting is that you are angry at the Japanese and also feel for them at the same time. That's the way this book is written. Sometimes the good guys are bad and sometimes the bad guy are good. In the end, of course, the American and Filipino soldiers really suffered, so this is really a story of great courage and endurance. This is now my favorite war novel. Five stars all the way through the read.

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