Conduct Under Fire

Starred review from March 21, 2005
Four American doctors were captured by the Japanese when Corregidor surrendered in May 1942. George Ferguson came from Kansas City, Mo., and cleaned beer vats to help pay his way through college. John Bookman was the scion of a New York Jewish family that had been part of America's medical elite for generations. Fred Berley was from Chicago's West Side. Murray Glusman was the son of a New York City pharmacist. John Glusman is his son, and an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Consulting a wide range of archival and printed sources and complementing them with interviews of American, British and Australian survivors of Japanese prison camps, and the guards and administrators who ran them, Glusman has written a compelling account of courage and sacrifice from the perspective of the doctors who sought to keep their fellow captives alive under conditions that amounted to a mass sentence of death. He vividly shows Navy doctors working to exhaustion mending broken bodies, nursing a variety of exotic illnesses, treating spiritual as well as physical pain over three and a half years, deprived of bandages, instruments and the simplest of medicines. Over a third of American POWs held by the Japanese died in captivity. With grace and clarity, Glusman gives a keen sense of loss to that statistic, and a heroic dignity to those who survived—a major achievement indeed. Agent, David Black. Author tour; partial BOMC main selection; dual main selection of History Book Club; Literary Guild offering.