George Ferguson came from Kansas City, Mo., and cleaned beer vats to help pay his way through college. John Bookman was the scion of a New York Jewish family that had been part of America's medical elite for generations. Fred Berley was from Chicago's West Side. Murray Glusman was the son of a New York City pharmacist. John Glusman is his son, and an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Consulting a wide range of archival and printed sources and complementing them with interviews of American, British and Australian survivors of Japanese prison camps, and the guards and administrators who ran them, Glusman has written a compelling account of courage and sacrifice from the perspective of the doctors who sought to keep their fellow captives alive under conditions that amounted to a mass sentence of death.

He vividly shows Navy doctors working to exhaustion mending broken bodies, nursing a variety of exotic illnesses, treating spiritual as well as physical pain over three and a half years, deprived of bandages, instruments and the simplest of medicines. Over a third of American POWs held by the Japanese died in captivity. With grace and clarity, Glusman gives a keen sense of loss to that statistic, and a heroic dignity to those who survived--a major achievement indeed.

Review: " When the Philippines fell to the Japanese, in 1942, thousands of G.I.s were captured. Many were, a military doctor said, "patients rather than prisoners"--hungry and sick with malaria and dysentery after weeks under siege at Bataan and Corregidor. Glusman tells the story of four Navy doctors among the P.O.W.s--one of them his father--who spent the next three and a half years working, stealing food, and playing bridge in Japanese prison camps. The doctors, technically noncombatants, were allowed to treat their fellow-P.O.W.s, and fought to get the medicine and other supplies they needed, usually without success. By the end of the war, their patients were starving to death; Glusman shows that survival depended on luck, as when the four are separated and one is shipped on a Japanese transport through a field of Allied submarines." Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 0142002224 / 9780142002223
Soft Cover As New Condition 

Price: 19.11 USD