SI.COM (Sports Illustrated) Monday Morning Quarterback

The Normans, husband and wife, are good friends of our family, and I tell you that to be upfront. It would be shame -- for you -- if you thought my affection for the Normans colors what I think of the book they worked on for the past 10 years. I don't consider myself anything close to a history expert, nor a fan of the military genre, but this is such a vivid slice of an important piece of American history that anyone with the slightest interest in where we have come from simply has to read this book.

It chronicles the story of the worst defeat in American military history through the eyes and emotions of young Montana soldier Ben Steele -- still alive today in Montana despite his harrowing 41-month imprisonment in the Phillippines and Japan in the 1940s. But it also tells the story of the war from the Japanese side, with incredible clarity and more empathy than any American veteran (particularly one such as Michael Norman, a former Marine who served in Vietnam) would normally show.

There is nothing anywhere like a book that transports you from the chair you're sitting in reading the book back to the time and place and into the heads of those who felt the story.