The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, 2009, by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman, read by Michael Prichard, Tantor Audio

This book is incredibly well-researched and the reader was great!    It also told the story of Bataan from both the U.S. and the Japanese perspective.  The authors used interviews and diaries to develop the story.

The negatives of the book are quite a few, however.  The book sometimes went into excruciating detail and it sometimes seemed as if getting through the book was was a death march in and of itself.  Also, the book seemed to jump around a bit and it left out some information that I would have liked to hear about.  For instance, the primary soldier that the book focused on was a Montana boy named Ben Steele.   There was quite a bit of narrative about Ben’s learning to draw while being held as a prisoner by the Japanese and how this activity helped him survive.  There was also some information about how Ben pursued his talent right after the war.  Then Ben is suddenly 80 years old and having a heart attack.  There is nothing about how Ben used his talent in his life after he went to school.

One thing that I gleaned from the book was how miserably MacArthur managed the defense of the Philippine Islands.  He probably should have been court-martialed  early on for such negligence rather than given a medal.  It is interesting how his public relations staff managed his image for him so that he was treated as a hero rather than the mediocre general that he really was.

This book is okay from the standpoint of the information it contains and the wonderful job Micheal Prichard did as the reader, but it certainly isn’t a great piece of literature or history.