For Us Surrender is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-ending War

By Mac McClelland

Wow. Well, if you have not heard about the atrocities happening every day in Burma welcome to the club. If you can tell them through a haze of beer and impending doom, well then you are Mac. Her reviewers give her the sought after "gonzo" title and in actuality she lives up to the hype. The "sources" section is so hard core the book should come with a bottle of advil (or vodka).

So, if you really don't know about Burma please read this book. I don't usually bring my politics into this blog but there is a lot of horrific things going on today in Burma that need to be understood. And the relative silence around the situation is embarrassing. It should be in all political discourse about human rights.

What i really appreciated about the book is the depth of historical perspective couched in personal, real individual stories.

Mac, good work.

(i love her footnotes, many of these quotes are footnotes)

"It's kind of weird that Burma has largely been forgotten in the popular World War II narrative, given its strategic importance and the staggering casualties there. The theater was Japan's greatest Pacific War defeat: Three out of five of the three hundred thousand soldiers who entered it never went home. More Japanese died there than in the bombing of Hiroshima, even factoring in the radiation-exposed casualties of the following several months." Page 43

"The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Burma the No. 1 worst country in the world to be a blogger, ahead of China and Egypt and Iran - prison sentences for them has been at least as high as twenty years." Page 56

"There's no mass movement behind the cause. And what's perhaps the mos heartbreaking about our unawareness of Burma's people is their hyper-awareness of us." Page 205

Burmese translated documents to introduce and acclimate potential transplants:

"The American life-style is not necessarily a good one. It is fast paced and highly stressful. After work or school, many Americans return home and sit on the couch all evening and watch TV. In addition, many eat a poor diet, full of mean, fats and sugars, and lacking in fiber and healthy grains, fruits and vegetables. Cigarette smoking and excessive drinking of alcohol contribute to the dangers." Page 256

Book 22

Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War

Amazing survival story. Not as well written (by a long shot) as Unbroken but a good story in and of itself. Amazing what the human spirit can endure. Ingenuity served Dieter well as he utilizes his survival skills from World War II in an entirely different war in Vietnam.

"The overriding rule seemed to be that Amarican pilots "couldn't shoot anyone unless they wee shot first." What the hell kind of war is that? If the other guy is a good shot, you're dead. Under such rules, the United States would 'still be fighting World War II.'" Pg 63

"Dieter saw stars, then passed out. He came to when water was thrown in his face. They beat him again until he passed out and again brought him back for more punishment. He lapsed into and out of unconsciousness." Page 143

"After being untied, Dieter used a twig to scratch into the dirt the outline of an aircraft with questionable aerodynamics. His creation had nine propellers: four engines on the right wing and five on the left."

Protests, no matter how small, were an important part of capture.

My only caution with this book is a distracting use of quotation marks by the author.

By Bruce Henderson

Book 21

The Nazi Officers Wife

By Edith Hahn Beer.

One Jewish woman's survival in Nazi Germany Married to a Nazi. This book shows you a different face of survival - one in which you have to live a false identity, a split personality, in order to survive.

"How can I describe to you The confusion and terror when the Nazi's took over? We had lived until yesterday in a rational world. Now everyone around us - our schoolmates, neighbors and teachers; our tradesmen, policemen, and bureaucrats -had all gone mad." page 56

"You will ask how I felt about spending so much time with people who supported the Hitler regime. I will tell you that, since I had absolutely no choice in the matter, I no longer dared to think about it." Page 216

Book 20


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Maxine Plays

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Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

By Laura Hillenbrand

This is an incredible story, I could not put it down. Amazing and thought provoking book. Spoilers contained below so watch out. I recommend closing out of this blog and reading the book instead.

"There were 594 holes. All of the Nauru bombers had made it back, every one of them shot up, but none so badly as this." Page 104

"In its place, rising from below, came dark blue shapes, gliding in lithe arcs. A neat, sharp form, flat and shining, cut the surface and began tracing circles around the rafts. Another one joined it. The sharks had found them." Page 129

"'It was awful, awful, awful,' he said through tears sixty years later. '. . . If you dig into it, it comes back to you. That's the way war is.'" Page 140

"Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who faded the most. Louie and Phill's optimism, and Mac's hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling." Page 147

"A moment later, the second shark jumped up. Louie grabbed an oar and struck the shark in the nose, and it jerked back and slid away. Then the first shark lunged for him again." Page 160

"Though they didn't know it, they had passed what was almost certainly the record for survival adrift in an inflated raft. If anyone had survived longer, they hadn't lived to tell about it." Pg 165

"Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end." Page 166

"Louie found that the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge." Page 166

"Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live." Page 182

"Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet." Page 183

"Japanese historians call this phenomenon 'transfer of oppression.'"

Page 194

"What Hirose did took nerve. Everywhere in Japan, demonstrating sympathy for captives or POW's was taboo." Page 196

"Punctuating the passage of each day were beatings. Men were beaten for folding their arms, for sitting naked to help heal sores, for cleaning their teeth, for talking in their sleep. Most often, they were beaten for not understanding orders, which were almost always issued in Japanese." Page 193

"The only break in the gloom came in the form of a smiling guard who liked to saunter down the barracks aisle, pause before each cell, raise one leg, and vent a surly fart at the captive within. He never quite succeeded in farting his way down the entire cell block." Page 200

"The triumph was in the subversion." Page 203

"A fragrant favorite involved saving up intestinal gas, explosively voluminous thanks to chronic dysentery, prior to tenko. When the men were ordered to bow toward the emperor, the captives would pitch forward in concert and let thunderclaps fly for Hirohito." Page 204

"Though the captives' resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself. Everyone knew what the consequences would be if anyone were caught stealing newspapers or hiding items as incriminating as Harris's maps and dictionary. At the time, it seemed worth the risk." Page 205

"In Naoetsu's little POW insurgency, perhaps the most insidious feat was pulled off by Louie's friend Ken Marvin, a marine who'd been captured at Wake Atoll. At his work site, Marvin was supervised by a one-eyed civilian guard called Bad Eye. When Bad Eye asked him to teach him English, Marvin saw his chance. With secret delight, he began teaching Bad Eye catastrophically bad English. From that day forward, when asked, 'How are you?' Bad Eye would smilingly reply 'What the fuck do you care?'" Page 285

Regarding the Bird: "This man, thought Tinker, is a psychopath." Page 232

"Virtually nothing about Japan's use of POW's was in keeping with the Geneva Convention. To be an enlisted prisoner of war under the Japanese was to be a slave." Page 234

"By Wade's estimate, each man had been punched in the face some 220 times." Page 290

Book 19

The Thirnteenth Tale

By Diane Setterfield

I loved reading this book. 

"I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke up to read again - the lost joys of reading returned to me." Page 32

"I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?" Page 35

"What abomination of nature is it that divides a person between two bodies before birth, and then kills one of them? And what am I that is left? Half-dead, exiled in the world of the living by day, while at night, my soul cleaves to its twin in a shadowy limbo." Page 160

Book 18

Captive: My Time As A Prisoner of the Taliban

One man's powerful story about being captured by the Taliban. A very good read, difficult to imagine living in constant fear of being killed and under the stress of not knowing who deceived you. It is not clear from the book how he coped with the trauma he endured coupled with the great love he held for Afghanistan.

Book 17


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A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear

By Atiq Rahimi

"Unless sleep is less restless than wakefulness, do not rest"

Book ?


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