Tears In The Darkness, The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman & Elizabeth M. Norman; 2009; 463 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY; 978-0-374-27260-9; 2/2-2/9; checked out Multnomah County Library, Hillsdale

A young man named Ben Steele was raised in the wilds of Montana, running cattle, tending sheep camps, helping his father make ends meet by running shine for him, one day his mother suggested he might want to enlist in the Army before he got drafted.  That way they figured he get a job he liked instead of just being a grunt.  He became part of the Army Air Corp.  He ended up on Bataan a small island in the Philippines, where an under supplied, expendable group of men where abandoned by their government and their Army ranking officers.  After the Japanese Army had cut them off from there supplies and they realized there was no resupply coming, their General surrendered.  These men, including Ben Steele, who were already starving were forced to march 66 miles to their prison camp.  Many of them barefoot and with sometimes nothing more than loincloths for clothes.  They were subjected to unspeakable atrocities all along the route of what came to be known as the Bataan Death March.  Then they subject to even more abject atrocities in their prison camp, and some were transported to Japan to be used as slave labor.

The narrative device used here to tell the story works exceptionally well to draw the reader in, as we are immersed in the day to day life on Ben Steele.  Ben Steele made it through everything by leaning on the strengths he had developed on the plains of Montana and by sketching his way through the time.  After the war he returned to Montana and went to art school and became an art teacher.  The gripping climax of the book happens 50 years after the end of World War II.

Grade A+