Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides

Sep2

Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II’s Most Dramatic Mission by Hampton Sides.

Ghost Soldiers is a well-written and engrossing narrative history of the rescue of 513 American and British POWs from the Japanese prison camp of Cabanatuan in the Philippines. The soldiers imprisoned at Cabanatuan at the time of the rescue (January, 1945) were mostly survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March, survivors who were barely surviving since most of the somewhat healthier prisoners had already been transferred to Japan in anticipation of the Americans retaking of the Philippine Islands. This who were left at Cabanatuan were diseased, injured, and in a very precarious situation—not quite liberated, still under Japanese control, and dispensable because of their lack of usefulness as workers for the Japanese. There were indeed rumors of and precedent for a Japanese massacre of all the prisoners left at the camp as the Japanese retreated before the advancing U.S. armed forces.

The U.S. Army 6th Ranger Battalion was tasked with the mission of rescuing these prisoners of Cabanatuan from behind Japanese lines in January, 1945. The mission had to be done secretly and quickly. No one knew how long the prisoners would remain alive to be rescued. And the Rangers were a new and untried group of elite “commandos”, sort of an experiment. Would they be able to find the prisoners and bring them out before the Japanese army stopped them?

So, Mr. Sides, a journalist and author, has grabbed onto a great story. And it’s one I had never read about before, although I had read some things about Bataan (The Jersey Brothers by Sally Mott Freeman, We Band of Angels by Elizabeth Norman). He tells the story from alternating points of view, that of the Army Rangers who were sent to rescue the prisoners and that of the prisoners themselves who struggled with feelings of hopelessness and abandonment in addition to the physical deprivations and tortures of their ordeal. This way of telling the story works to increase the suspense as the two stories merge into the climactic scene of the Rescue.

One of the interesting things about this story was meeting unexpected heroes that I would like to read more about. Chaplain Robert Taylor, one of the prisoners who was selected to go to Japan just before the rescue took place, ended up on the ill-fated ship, Oryoku Maru, a hellish prison ship that was sunk off the coast of Bataan by the U.S. Navy. Taylor survived, went on another ship which was also disabled by U.S. bombers, finally was sent to Manchuria, survived his imprisonment there, and eventually after his return home became the highest ranking chaplain in the U.S. Armed Forces. Days of Anguish, Days of Hope by Billy Keith is a biography of Chaplain Taylor that I would like to read.

Then, among the 6th Ranger battalion, I encountered Dr. James Canfield Fisher, son of the famous author Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Captain James Fisher was a surgeon assigned to the Ranger battalion that freed Cabanatuan, and he insisted on going with his men up to very gates of the prison camp in order to be available to treat those who might be wounded in the attempted rescue. His story is all the more intriguing and poignant for me since I know of his mother and her books, including the classic Understood Betsy. Who knew that reading about World War II in the Philippines could circle around to connect back to children’s literature?

I recommend Ghost Soldiers to readers who are interested in reading about World War II adventures, the War in the Pacific, stories of courage and endurance, and just good narrative nonfiction. (If you liked Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand or Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff . . .) I found it to be fascinating and inspiring.

High Lonesome by Louis L’Amour

Aug20

I read this book partly to see if it would be appropriate for the young adults who patronize my library and partly just to see if I liked L’Amour’s fiction as much as I did his autobiography, The Education of a Wandering Man. I found two instances of mildly bad language (h— and d–n), not that I’m into counting. And there was a romance, but rather chaste even though the guy is an outlaw gunslinger and the girl is the daughter of an outlaw. I think it would be perfectly good for anyone fourteen or fifteen and up.

I don’t read many Westerns, but I can see how L’Amour’s books became so popular. This story of an attractive outlaw and a young but strong girl who falls for him has more going for it than just the romance. There’s male-bonding, a bit of bromance, and a lots of fighting and honor among thieves and standing up for what’s right even when it looks hopeless.

L’Amour’s characters are flawed, but likable. The peril they find themselves in is partly due to their own bad decisions, but partly just the luck of the draw. The idea is that everybody eventually has to choose to do the right thing or be a self-seeking coward, even those who have chosen the wrong side of the law in the past. And it’s not whether you follow the law that makes you a good man, rather it’s whether or not you follow your own internal compass of right and wrong and make the hard right choice when the crisis comes. I would argue that if you haven’t built up those muscles of choosing right in the minor issues you are unlikely to choose right when a really big choice requiring self denial comes along, but L’Amour’s characters don’t have that much nuance.

Considine, the hero of the novel, is a man who “had a way of getting to where he wanted to be without being seen.” “[T]he big, quiet man was very sure of himself, and was known to be a dangerous man with a gun.’ “Considine did not seem like an outlaw. He had the air of a gentleman and there was something undefined in his manner that set him apart.” “Nor were they free of the images their own minds held of themselves. The man on horseback, the lone-riding man, the lone-thinking man, possessed an image of himself that was in part his own, in part a piece of all the dime novels he had read, for no man is free of the image his literature imposes upon him. And the dime novel made the western hero a knight-errant.”

I’m casting, of course, John Wayne, in my mind’s eye as Considine. If you like that kind of movie or book or if you like dime novel western heroes, High Lonesome should be just the ticket. No irony here, just straight up shootin’ and ridin’ and honor and heroism with a little bit of bank robbing thrown in.

The Lost Girl by Anne Ursu

Aug19

Iris and her identical twin sister Lark take care of each other. Well, Iris, the practical twin, takes care of Lark, the dreamy one. And Lark, the imaginative, creative sister, helps Iris deal with her nightmares and anxieties. They “have better outcomes when they’re together.” It’s a workable and loving relationship until the girls’ parents decide that they need to be in separate classrooms for fifth grade. Then Iris loses her confidence, even her sense of identity. Who is Iris without Lark beside her? Lark loses things, as various objects around the house and around town begin to disappear. Iris and Lark are afraid of losing each other, and their fear becomes identified with a strange new antique shop that just opened up across the street from the library. How can the twins make everyone else understand that they need to be together? Or do they need to grow apart?

This book might be profound in a psychological way, but I’m not sure I’m a deep enough thinker to get it. The twins are sort of co-dependent? Maybe co-dependent in a bad way, but by the end of the book they learn to help each other in good ways? It’s sort of dark, and there are some strong feminist girl-power themes and preachiness, but you-go-girl feminism wasn’t overwhelming to the point of being annoying. I did find the story fascinating and compelling. I read it in one day.

This book might win some awards. The last third of the book is particularly creepy and unsettling, but you can reassure frightened readers (yourself?) that the story does end well. And the writing is magical, both literally and figuratively speaking.

Me and Sam-Sam Handle the Apocalypse by Susan Vaught

Aug17

Alone by Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—

I came across this poem by one of my favorite poets today after I finished reading the middle grade fiction novel Me and Sam-Sam Handle the Apocalypse, and it seemed to be serendipitous. Me and Sam-Sam is a book about characters who are “neuro-divergent” —or “autistic” or “on the spectrum” or whatever term you prefer. The narrator of the story, Jesse Broadview, is a middle school age girl who lives with her teacher father and her great-aunt Gustine while Jesse’s mom is deployed in Iraq, the handler for a bomb-sniffing dog. Much like the narrator of the poem, Jesse doesn’t see as others see and doesn’t act as others act and doesn’t feel the same things that others feel. She has meltdowns. She sometimes comes across as rude because she doesn’t understand the rules for social interactions that other seem to apply without effort. She doesn’t like to be touched unexpectedly or without permission. She’s just not neurotypical, although she is smart, intelligent enough to worry that her differences are somehow bad and that her difficulties in understanding the way others think might mean that her brain is broken.

As the story progresses, Jesse makes a friend, Springer, who may or may not be neuro-divergent himself, and she learns that her differences can be strengths even though they sometimes make it difficult for her to navigate the world she lives in. The novel is part detective story, part experiment in understanding diversity, and part adventure story about facing up to bullies and natural disasters and one’s own inner demons. Jesse’s dad is accused of a crime, and Jesse and Springer are the only ones who really see a need to exonerate him. Jesse and her new friend have to contend with Jerkface and his two cockroaches, the bullies that make Jesse’s and Springer’s lives miserable. And some really bad weather is headed their way.

I found the story fascinating, especially as I worked to understand Jesse’s mindset and her perspective on all of the events in the novel. I really wanted someone to tell Jesse that calling people “jerkface” and “cockroach” is not a good way to deal with your—justifiable—hostility and enmity toward them. Nor is violence the answer. Instead, Jesse’s mother engages in name-calling herself, via Skype, and the violence and threats continue, even among the adults in the story. I sometimes struggled to understand Jesse and sympathize with her because, let’s face it, I’m pretty neuro-typical.

And yet, all of us have felt the feeling in the poem, the feeling of aloneness. The feeling that maybe my brain is broken, maybe I just don’t feel what other people feel or think the same way other people think. Books and poetry are good ways to start to understand the commonalities in human experience and the differences that define us as individuals. I thought Me and Sam-Sam was a decent attempt, not preachy but illuminating, to show what it is like to be neuro-divergent and somewhat immature and still valuable and growing as a person.

Great Northern? by Arthur Ransome

Aug16

Most books don’t have titles that end in a question mark. None of the other books in the Swallows and Amazons series have questioning titles. But this one, appropriately, does because in this installment of the adventures of the intrepid children who make up the Swallows and Amazons and their friends, Dick, the resident naturalist and birder, is looking for and hoping he has found a pair of Great Northern Divers in the Hebrides islands where the children are sailing with their uncle and enabler, Captain Flint.

“The Great Northern Diver nests abroad . . . usually seen solitary.”
“. . . nests in eastern North America, Greenland, and Iceland.”
“. . . may nest in the Shetlands, as it is often round these islands all summer, but this has never been proved.”

When Dick finds this rare bird, or at least thinks he has found it, in the Scottish Hebrides, he and his friends compete to protect the divers with other birdwatchers who want to exploit the birds for fame and fortune. This exciting story will delight all Swallows and Amazons fans.

I only have three more Swallows and Amazons books to enjoy for the first time now: Missee Lee, The Picts and the Martyrs, and The Big Six. I found a copy of this book Great Northern? while Engineer Husband and I were in Oxford, England in a small Oxfam bookstore. It will always hold a special place in my heart because of the good story, but also because of where I found it.

One of the things about Ransome’s stories that should make them popular nowadays is their concern with nature and its preservation and protection. The children in these stories are careful to observe birds and other flora and fauna without disturbing them or destroying their habitats. I won’t say that Ransome was ahead of his time because many naturalists, if not most, have always been concerned with protecting the creatures they study and with protecting habitats. However, the general tone and themes of the books is perfect for today’s environmentalist mindset.

The Friendship War by Andrew Clements

Aug7

Former fifth grade teacher Andrew Clements, according to the author blurb in this book, has written over eighty books for children, mostly fiction and mostly set in school classrooms. He’s the master of the “school story”, and his most famous book, Frindle, has sold over six million copies to date. The Friendship War, Clements’ newest novel, is about friendship, but also about how a fad, like pet rocks or cootie catchers, gets started and how it grows. Strangely enough, or maybe not so strangely, Frindle is also about trend-setting and how an idea, or a fad, gets started and grows and becomes uncontrollable.

The story begins with Grace and her grandfather who discover a stash of thousands of buttons in an old mill that Grampa is rehabbing. Grace wants the buttons, and Grampa gives them to her. Then, it’s back to school and Grace’s longstanding friendship with the popular Ellie, a friendship that is about to be tested by the accidental beginning of a fad—a fad for buttons.

This story about friendship and about buttons is Clements’ best since Frindle. Grace is a great character, something of a collector, a thinker, and as her new friend Hank calls her, a catalyst. And these sixth graders are just at the age where a new fad in school can show them important things about themselves and about their friendships, if they are paying attention. Clements handles the dynamics of sixth grade friendships well. Grace’s new friend Hank doesn’t turn into a boyfriend or a crush, although there’s some very mild teasing about that from Grace’s grandfather, which seems perfectly in character. There’s a conversation about life after death between Grace and her mother that gives food for thought without being didactic. And the whole story is just deftly handled and insightful in regard to friendships and social groups and the life cycle of a fad or trend.

Middle grade readers will enjoy this story and probably make connections to fads and trends in their own experience. There is also a lot of wisdom in the book about friendships: how to initiate them, how to sustain them, how to repair broken friendships, what makes a friendship worth working for.This book is one I would like to add to my library, and that’s high praise since my shelf space is limited to only the cream of the crop.

August 6th Thoughts

Aug6

Born on this date:
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, b. 1809. Tennyson became Poet Laureate of Britain in 1851, but long before his appointment to that post and long before he became even a famous poet, Tennyson made friends with another poet, Arthur Henry Hallam, whose sudden death at the very young age of twenty-two became the inspiration for many of Tennyson’s most famous poems. Poems such as “Break, Break, Break”, “Ulysses”, “Tithonus”, “Tiresias”, “Morte d’Arthur”, “Oh that it ’twere possible”, “Crossing the Bar”, and “In Memoriam” were all elegies “connected overtly or implicitly with the loss of his friend.” Tennyson wrote about death, and mental illness, and strong emotion, and the healing power of nature because he experienced all of these things in his tumultuous lifetime.

To whom is the poet or narrator speaking? Without having read the excerpt in context (it’s part of a longer poem, In Memoriam), I think he’s talking to God.

Gerald W. Johnson, b. 1890. Author of America Is Born, America Moves Forward, and America Grows Up, all history books for children subtitled A History for Peter. Johnson wrote the books for his grandson, Peter, to give him an appreciation for his heritage as an American. The books are popular with homeschoolers who are attempting to do the same with their own children and grandchildren.

Barbara Cooney, b. 1917. Author and/or illustrator of many lovely picture books, including The Little Juggler,, Miss Rumphius, Eleanor, Hattie and the Wild Waves, Island Boy, and Chanticleer and Fox (by Geoffrey Chaucer).

I’ve also been thinking about justice and injustice and neurodivergence and the difficulties of knowing the truth about any event or person in history, even recent history and differing perspectives and negativity and aloneness. Lots of thoughts on an August day.

August 5th Thoughts

Aug5

Today is my son-in-law’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Brandon!

Other birthdays today:
Ruth Sawyer (Durand), b. 1880, d. 1970. Ruth Sawyer was first and foremost a storyteller. She wrote several children’s books, including the Newbery award-winning Roller Skates, but her forte was collecting and telling stories derived from folklore from around the world. I have her book The Way of the Storyteller, a sort of manual/inspiration for storytellers, and I need to review it to refresh my own storytelling skills.

Maud Petersham, b. 1890. Maud was the female half of the storytelling, book writing duo of Maud and Miska Petersham. She was born Maud Fuller, the daughter of a Baptist minister, graduated from Vassar College, and met Miska Petersham, a Hungarian immigrant, when they were both working at a advertising agency in New York. The couple went on to collaborate on more than fifty books, and they contributed illustrations for numerous anthologies and collections of stories and poems for children. Their collection of American poems and songs, The Rooster Crows, won the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 1946.

Robert Bright, b. 1902. Bright wrote Georgie, a picture book about “a friendly and shy little ghost who lives in Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker’s attic.” But my favorite book by Bright is My Red Umbrella, in which a little girl shares her red umbrella even as it grows bigger and bigger to shelter all of the animals that come to get out of the rain, including a great big bear.

I’m also thinking and praying today about weddings (about to celebrate one this weekend), gun violence and the people who were injured and traumatized by violent men in Dayton and in El Paso, Abraham Lincoln and the violence he caused, endured, and ended (still reading Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin), Hiroshima and the violence there (tomorrow is the 73rd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima). Since Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, we humans are a violent race. It’s not a cure-all by any means, but I can’t see why legislation to ban the use by civilians of certain military-style weapons or to limit the size of magazines would be an infringement on the Constitution or on anyone’s freedom or rights under that Constitution.

A Place To Belong by Cynthia Kadohata

Aug5

To be honest, I am tired of reading children’s books about the Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. I know that it’s important to remember the injustice that was done to Japanese Americans during that time. I know that the story and the information are new to new generations of children. I know that everyone’s story deserves to be told, either fictionalized for the sake of privacy or as biography or memoir, and I know that survivors of injustice deserve to be heard. Nevertheless, I’ve read this book by Sandra Dallas and this one by Kirby Larson and Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata and Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Houston and Journey to Topaz by Yoshiko Uchida and Paper Wishes by Lois Sepahban and Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki and The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559, Mirror Lake Internment Camp by Barry Denenberg and . . . many more. I thought that this new middle grade fiction book by Cynthia Kadohata would have nothing new to say about this disgraceful episode in American history, but I expected it to be well written by Newbery award-winning author Kadohata.

And it was, well written and surprisingly engaging and informative. I knew that many Japanese internees decided to prove their loyalty to the United States, despite the way they had been treated, by enlisting and serving in the U.S. military. I didn’t know that up to six thousand others decided that there was no place for them in the United States immediately after the war, and so they renounced their U.S. citizenship and were returned to Japan. A Place To Belong is the story of one family who “went back” to a country that most of them had never visited in the first place.

The story is told from the perspective of twelve year old Hanako. She and her father and mother and her little brother Akira are on a boat bound for Japan. There they plan to stay with Hanako’s father’s parents, her grandparents, on a farm near Hiroshima. First, however, the train that they board in Japan goes through the ruins of Hiroshima itself, and that’s a tragic and sobering scene that sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Post-war Japan really has no place for Hanako’s family either, even though Hanako’s grandparents turn out to be the most gracious and loving grandparents a girl could want.

The grandparents, Hanako’s parents, Hanako herself, Akira who is “a strange little creature” (maybe autistic?), and the other characters who enter into the story are all drawn with loving care by a talented author. I learned a lot about Japanese history and culture, and I never felt as if I were being taught a lesson or preached a sermon on the evils of imperialistic racist America. Kadohata lets the story unfold its own lessons, lessons about justice, and forgiveness, and second chances, and forming new dreams. I was charmed by the wisdom and perseverance of Hanako’s grandparents and filled with compassion for Hanako’s family and for all the families and individuals who were faced with impossible choices during and after World War II.

I think there might also be certain parallels between the story of A Place To Belong and the current refugee/immigrant crisis at the Mexican/American border, but I haven’t completely teased those out in my mind. Suffice it to say that today’s refugees are often looking for a place to belong, too. And Americans would do well to look at their situation from their perspective if possible and show compassion for people making hard choices.

July 30th Thoughts

Jul30

Today is the birthday of Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights, which seems to be a rather polarizing book. One person on Facebook who was reading it asked, “Does it ever move beyond unhappy people causing misery to themselves and others?” Someone else said, “Anyone who says they love Wuthering Heights is lying to sound smart.” But yet another reader said, “The prose just wraps me up and sweeps me away and I can’t help but love it. My relationship with that book is such a mess.”

I’m not lying when I say that I liked the story, even though I found almost all of the characters unsympathetic and sadly unlikeable, especially Heathcliff and Cathy. I’m not sure what that opinion says about me as a reader or as a person, but nevertheless I recommend you form your own opinion by reading Wuthering Heights. If you get fifty pages in and you hate it, I give you permission to quit and go read Jan Karon or P.G. Wodehouse to get the taste out of your palate. (Or you could try Diary of a Nobody. See below.)

Allan Wesley Eckert (not born on this date), author of Incident at Hawk’s Hill, a Newbery Honor book in 1972, “spent much of his youth hitchhiking around the country, living off the land and learning about wildlife from direct observation.” He was born in 1931, so this hitchhiking would have taken place in the late forties/early fifties. I wonder what his family thought about his choice to wander about and live off the land. This was before the era of the hippies and free-spirited sixties peaceniks. He wrote a lot of books. I wonder if he wrote one about his youthful experiences hitchhiking about the country.

I read the first couple of chapters of Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith, a book I picked up while Engineer Husband and I were in Oxford. It’s a fictionalized diary of an ordinary man in the late nineteenth century who lives in a small house outside the City (London?) with his wife Carrie. The man’s name is Charles Pooter, and he’s a perfectly ordinary little man who takes himself quite seriously, which makes the book quite funny. The humor is dry and unassuming, but definite. For example, it begins:

“Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see—because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’—why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.”

CHARLES POOTER
The Laurels
Brickfield Terrace
Holloway

George Grossmith went on to become a famous comic actor, starring in many of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most famous operas: as The Sorcerer, The First Lord in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ko-Ko in The Mikado, Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore, Bunthorne in Patience, and Jack Point in The Yeoman of the Guard. George’s brother, Weedon, illustrated Diary of a Nobody, and the illustrations are a great part of the charm of the book. I’m looking forward to savoring it over a period of several days.

This post is probably the first time that Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff and Cathy and George Grossmith’s Mr. Pooter have been referenced in the same piece of writing, but perhaps there will be connections as I continue reading Diary of a Nobody.