Memorial Day is a time to gather with friends and family, welcome summer, fire up
the grill and relax, and after many days of rain, we can celebrate on a beautiful sunny day today. But most of all, Memorial Day is a time to
remember and honor the heroic men and women who gave their lives in
serving and protecting our country and freedoms.
Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II by Mitchell Zuckoff.
On November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice
Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search-and-rescue mission
became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all
nine men on board survived, and the US military launched a daring rescue
operation. But after picking up one man, the Grumman Duck amphibious
plane flew into a severe storm and vanished.
Frozen in Time tells
the story of these crashes and the fate of the survivors, bringing
vividly to life their battle to endure 148 days of the brutal Arctic
winter, until an expedition headed by famed Arctic explorer Bernt
Balchen brought them to safety. Mitchell Zuckoff takes the reader deep
into the most hostile environment on earth, through hurricane-force
winds, vicious blizzards, and subzero temperatures.
Moving
forward to today, he recounts the efforts of the Coast Guard and North
South Polar Inc. – led by indefatigable dreamer Lou Sapienza – who
worked for years to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight and
recover the remains of its crew.
The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokow
"In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy,
to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the
massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning
of the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. There, I underwent a
life-changing experience. As I walked the beaches with the American
veterans who had returned for this anniversary, men in their sixties and
seventies, and listened to their stories, I was deeply moved and
profoundly grateful for all they had done. Ten years later, I returned
to Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion, and by then I
had come to understand what this generation of Americans meant to
history. It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever
produced." ~ Tom Brokow. This book pays tribute to the generation of Americans who fought in World War II,
telling the stories of individual men and women who, united by common
purpose and values, served their country overseas and returned to create
modern America.
In February
1966, U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler was shot down over "neutral Laos."
He crashed deep in territory controlled by North Vietnamese army
regulars and the communist Pathet Lao, who would eventually capture him
and hold him prisoner in a fortified jungle prisoner-of-war camp. But
German-born Dengler was no ordinary prisoner. Already a legend in the
Navy for his escape and evasion skills---amply demonstrated during
training in the California desert---he would initiate, plan, and lead an
organized escape from the POW camp, becoming the longest-held American
to escape captivity during the Vietnam War. Caught in a most desperate
situation, imprisoned not only by the enemy but by the jungle itself,
Dengler's heroic impulse was to not only get himself out but to free all
the other POWs---Americans, Thai, and Chinese---some of whom had been
held for years.
PROOF OF HEAVEN
A moving, vividly told memoir full of heart, drama, and exquisite comic
timing, about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a
bar. J .R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: It was the sound of
his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his
first words. As a boy, J.R. would press his ear to a clock radio,
straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of masculinity, and
the keys to his own identity. J.R.'s mother was his world, his anchor,
but he needed something else, something more, something he couldn't
name. So he turned to the bar on the corner, a grand old New York saloon
that was a sanctuary for all types of men-cops and poets, actors and
lawyers, gamblers and stumble bums.....When the time came for
J.R. to leave home, the bar became a way station-from his entrance to
Yale, where he floundered as a scholarship student way out of his
element; to his introduction to tragic romance with a woman way out of
his league; to his stint as a copy boy at the New York Times, where he
was a faulty cog in a vast machine way out of his control. Through it
all, the bar offered shelter from failure, from rejection, and
eventually from reality-until at last the bar turned J.R. away. Riveting,
moving, and achingly funny, The Tender Bar is at once an evocative
portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and a touching depiction
of how some men remain lost boys." ~from the Publisher
