I HAVE READ Tears in the Darkness twice this year. Its moving story of survival on the road to Bataan in 1942 makes any of my sacrifices pale by comparison.
Interspersed inside the book are sketches by Ben Steele, a survivor. The images often come dripping with hate through the pages in his sketchbooks, spanning more than thirty volumes of trials and exercises. The leaves of Steele's sketchbooks hold his ghosts: page after page of prisoners of war and the Imperial hohei who guarded him for one thousand two hundred and forty-four days.
The book reads like a novel and its drawings provide an emotive layer. The sketches of faces followed Ben Steele home from the prisoner of war camps. To see his sketches is to visit the haunted memories of the man himself.
Sent mail2blog from my Nokia phone after packing Tears in the Darkness for a loan.
Michael Norman and Elizabeth Norman -- Tears in the Darkness ISBN 0312429703
