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Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II (P.S.) Mitchell Zuckoff On May 13, 1945, twenty-four American servicemen and WACs boarded a transport plane for a sightseeing trip over “Shangri-La,” a beautiful and mysterious valley deep within the jungle-covered mountains of Dutch New Guinea. Unlike the peaceful Tibetan monks of James Hilton’s bestselling novel Lost Horizon, this Shangri-La was home to spear-carrying tribesmen, warriors rumored to be cannibals. But the pleasure tour became an unforgettable battle for survival when the plane crashed. Miraculously, three passengers pulled through. Margaret Hastings, barefoot and burned, had no choice but to wear her dead best friend’s shoes. John McCollom, grieving the death of his twin brother also aboard the plane, masked his grief with stoicism. Kenneth Decker, too, was severely burned and suffered a gaping head wound. Emotionally devastated, badly injured, and vulnerable to the hidden dangers of the jungle, the trio faced certain death unless they left the crash site. Caught between man-eating headhunters and enemy Japanese, the wounded passengers endured a harrowing hike down the mountainside—a journey into the unknown that would lead them straight into a primitive tribe of superstitious natives who had never before seen a white man—or woman. Drawn from interviews, declassified U.S. Army documents, personal photos and mementos, a survivor’s diary, a rescuer’s journal, and original film footage, Lost in Shangri-La recounts this incredible true-life adventure for the first time. Mitchell Zuckoff reveals how the determined trio—dehydrated, sick, and in pain—traversed the dense jungle to find help; how a brave band of paratroopers risked their own lives to save the survivors; and how a cowboy colonel attempted a previously untested rescue mission to get them out. By trekking into the New Guinea jungle, visiting remote villages, and rediscovering the crash site, Zuckoff also captures the contemporary natives’ remembrances of the long-ago day when strange creatures fell from the sky. A riveting work of narrative nonfiction that vividly brings to life an odyssey at times terrifying, enlightening, and comic, Lost in Shangri-La is a thrill ride from beginning to end. |
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Evidence Not Seen: A Woman's Miraculous Faith in the Jungles of World War II Darlene Deibler Rose This is the true story of a young American missionary woman courage and triump of faith in the jungles of New Guinea and her four years in a notorious Japanese prison camp. Never to see her husband again, she was forced to sign a confession to a crime she did not commit and face the executioner's sword, only to be miraculously spared. |
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The Color of War: How One Battle Broke Japan and Another Changed America James Campbell From the acclaimed World War II writer and author of The Ghost Mountain Boys, an incisive retelling of the key month, July 1944, that won the war in the pacific and ignited a whole new struggle on the home front.
In the pantheon of great World War II conflicts, the battle for Saipan is often forgotten. Yet historian Donald Miller calls it "as important to victory over Japan as the Normandy invasion was to victory over Germany." For the Americans, defeating the Japanese came at a high price. In the words of a Time magazine correspondent, Saipan was "war at its grimmest."
On the night of July 17, 1944, as Admirals Ernest King and Chester Nimitz were celebrating the battle's end, the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot, just thirty-five miles northeast of San Francisco, exploded with a force nearly that of an atomic bomb. The men who died in the blast were predominantly black sailors. They toiled in obscurity loading munitions ships with ordnance essential to the US victory in Saipan. Yet instead of honoring the sacrifice these men made for their country, the Navy blamed them for the accident, and when the men refused to handle ammunition again, launched the largest mutiny trial in US naval history.
The Color of War is the story of two battles: the one overseas and the one on America's home turf. By weaving together these two narratives for the first time, Campbell paints a more accurate picture of the cataclysmic events that occurred in July 1944--the month that won the war and changed America. |
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Fortress Rabaul: The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942-April 1943 Bruce Gamble For most of World War II, the mention of Japan's island stronghold sent shudders through thousands of Allied airmen. Some called it “Fortress Rabaul,” an apt name for the headquarters of the Imperial Japanese forces in the Southwest Pacific. Author Bruce Gamble chronicles Rabaul’s crucial role in Japanese operations in the Southwest Pacific. Millions of square feet of housing and storage facilities supported a hundred thousand soldiers and naval personnel. Simpson Harbor and the airfields were the focus of hundreds of missions by American air forces. Winner of the "Gold Medal" (Military Writers Society of America) and "Editor's Choice Award" (Stone & Stone Second World War Books), Fortress Rabaul details a critical and, until now, little understood chapter in the history of World War II. |
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The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific James Campbell A harrowing portrait of a largely forgotten campaign that pushed one battalion to the limits of human suffering.
Despite their lack of jungle training, the 32nd Division’s “Ghost Mountain Boys” were assigned the most grueling mission of the entire Pacific campaign in World War II: to march over the 10,000-foot Owen Stanley Mountains to protect the right flank of the Australian army during the battle for New Guinea. Reminiscent of the classics like Band of Brothers and The Things They Carried, The Ghost Mountain Boys is part war diary, part extreme-adventure tale, and—through letters, journals, and interviews—part biography of a group of men who fought to survive in an environment every bit as fierce as the enemy they faced. Theirs is one of the great untold stories of the war.
“Superb.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Campbell started out with history, but in the end he has written a tale of survival and courage of near-mythic proportions.”
—America in WWII magazine
“In this compelling and sprightly written account, Campbell shines a long-overdue light on the equally deserving heroes of the Red Arrow Division.”
—Military.com |
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Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power Eben Kirksey Eben Kirksey first went to West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, in 1998 as an exchange student. His later study of West Papua's resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and the forces of globalization morphed as he discovered that collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of this dynamic social movement. Accompanying indigenous activists to Washington, London, and the offices of the oil giant BP, Kirksey saw the revolutionaries' knack for getting inside institutions of power and building coalitions with unlikely allies, including many Indonesians. He discovered that the West Papuans' pragmatic activism was based on visions of dramatic transformations on coming horizons, of a future in which they would give away their natural resources in grand humanitarian gestures, rather than passively watch their homeland be drained of timber, gold, copper, and natural gas. During a lengthy, brutal occupation, West Papuans have harbored a messianic spirit and channeled it in surprising directions. Kirksey studied West Papua's movement for freedom as a broad-based popular uprising gained traction from 1998 until 2008. Blending extensive ethnographic research with indigenous parables, historical accounts, and compelling narratives of his own experiences, he argues that seeking freedom in entangled worlds requires negotiating complex interdependencies. |
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Fruit of the Motherland Maria Lepowsky Challenging the portrayal of sexual inequality as a universal condition, Lepowsky presents a vivid account of Vanatinai, a matrilineal society in New Guinea. Contradticting scholars who consider sexual inequality a universal condition, Fruit of the Motherland reveals an exceptional society in which women have equivalent access to power and prestige and significant control over the means of production. Lepowsky presents an ethnography of Vanatinai, a matrilineal, decentralized society in New Guinea where there is no ideology of male dominance and women and men are considered fundamentally equal. tracing the life cycle of islanders of both sexes, she examines the role of gender in thye Vanatinai's: social life and history, religious philosophy and worldview, practice of ceremonial exchange and ritual. In addition, Fruit of the Motherland includes useful cross-cultural analysis of gender roles, ideologies, and power. |
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From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea Paige West In this vivid ethnography, Paige West tracks coffee as it moves from producers in Papua New Guinea to consumers around the world. She illuminates the social lives of the people who produce coffee, and those who process, distribute, market, and consume it. The Gimi peoples, who grow coffee in Papua New Guinea's highlands, are eager to expand their business and social relationships with the buyers who come to their highland villages, as well as with the people working in Goroka, where much of Papua New Guinea's coffee is processed; at the port of Lae, where it is exported; and in Hamburg, Sydney, and London, where it is distributed and consumed. This rich social world is disrupted by neoliberal development strategies, which impose prescriptive regimes of governmentality that are often at odds with Melanesian ways of being in, and relating to, the world. The Gimi are misrepresented in the specialty coffee market, which relies on images of primitivity and poverty to sell coffee. By implying that the "backwardness" of Papua New Guineans impedes economic development, these images obscure the structural relations and global political economy that actually cause poverty in Papua New Guinea. |
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The Path of Infinite Sorrow: The Japanese on the Kokoda Track Craig Collie, Hajime Marutani "We were all skin and bone, as if our stomachs were stuck to the inside wall of our back." Two armies, Japanese and Australian, each in turn pushing the other back along a muddy, precipitous track over the mountainous spine of New Guinea. Few prisoners were taken, most were shot. War conventions were routinely flouted, by both sides. Troops were reduced to a primal level, such were the inhuman conditions in which battles were waged. This was the Kokoda campaign of 1942. The Australian experience of Kokoda has been told often and told well. The Japanese, however, remain the shadowy enemy lurking in the dense undergrowth, better known for atrocities than their participation in battle. The Path of Infinite Sorrow tells for the first time the story of the campaign from the Japanese point of view. Based on personal accounts and the recollections of six Japanese soldiers, captured diaries and unit, this powerful re-examination of Kokoda brings a new perspective to one of the most brutal conflicts in Australian war history. |
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Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Conduct and Communication) Steven Feld Now in its second edition, Sound and Sentiment is an ethnographic study of sound as a cultural system--that is, a system of symbols--among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea. It shows how an analysis of modes and codes of sound communication leads to an understanding of life in Kaluli society. By studying the form and performance of weeping, poetics, and song in relation to the Kaluli natural and spiritual world, Steven Feld reveals Kaluli sound expressions as embodiments of deeply felt sentiments.
For this second edition the author has updated his original work with a new, innovative chapter that includes an interpretive review by its subjects, the Kaluli people themselves. He has also written a new preface and discography and revised the references section. |