A tightly researched, hard hitting account.

books:


	• Apocalypse Undone: My Survival of Japanese Imprisonment During World War II Preston John Hubbard Vanderbilt University Press, 1990 - 276 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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A tightly researched, hard hitting account.

Dr. Hubbard presents a story of imprisonment under the Japanese that no one would soon forget. While it contains all of the ingredients of a first rate war memoir, this is no mere tale. The author waited some 40 years to tell his story and has taken the benefit of that time and his extensive education (he holds a PhD in history from Vanderbilt) to analyze and evaluate his thoughts and responses to torture and deprivation. A fine historian, he is able to look past the animosity that anyone would feel toward former torturers and give a detailed and exciting account of a man facing the extremes of human brutality. It is this perspective that sets this book apart from so many other books by former POW's. In a day when "Saving Private Ryan" has introduced a new generation to the realities of the second World War in Europe, this book would well serve to introduce any interested reader to the conditions present in the war in the Pacific. A very readable and engrossing book for any age of teen to adult. My highest recommendation.

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Apocalypse Undone recounts Preston Hubbard's four-and-a-half year odyssey from a young, idealistic CCC worker to a much older, troubled man full of contempt for war and those who make it. He survived the Bataan Death March; imprisonment at Camp O'Donnell, where the death rate exceded 400 a day; a jungle work detail on Tayabas Isthmus; the starvation diet of Manila's Bilibid Prison; a 17 day voyage to Japan on a Hell Ship; and a Japanese POW camp bombed by American planes.