Hero of Bataan: The Story of General Jonathan M. Wainwright by Duane Schultz (Book)

Hero of Bataan: The Story of General Jonathan M. Wainwright is a book written by the American author Duane Schultz. It was published by St. Martin's Press in 1981.

Description from the book's dust jacket:

"Remember Bataan! Remember Corregidor!" These words rallied a nation in the first dark days of World War II. When defeat screamed from every headline, "Skinny" Wainwright led the ragged troops of the U.S. Army in the Philippines into battle again and again, disrupting Japan's timetable for the conquest of the Pacific. With dwindling supplies, little food, no air force or navy, and outmoded weapons from World War I, Wainwright fought a modern, well-equipped army to a standstill for almost five months. His actions were called a triumph in the face of overwhelming odds, as fine as any military action in history.

General Wainwright was the man MacArthur left behind when he was ordered to leave the hopelessly surrounded American garrison holding off the Japanese. He was also the highest-ranking American captive in World War II, though he had to endure scanty rations, beatings, and emotional harassments as a POW until the end of the war. His return - as a haggard, frail, and yet still-proud soldier - brought him a fourth star and the Medal of Honor. It also resulted in an outpouring of patriotism on a national scale unmatched until the recent return of the hostages from Iran.

Duane Schultz has written a superb history of the struggle for Bataan and Corregidor. He has combed through military files, captured documents, and personal diaries of scores of army personnel who served in the Philippines. In addition, he has interviewed dozens of men and women who span Wainwright's career from his West Point class of 1906 to his death in 1953 to tell this story - the story of a genuine, old-fashioned American hero.

About the Author (text from the book):

Duane Schultz is Adjunct Professor at the University of South Florida. His latest World War II books are Wake Island: The Heroic Gallant Fight, a feature of the Military Book Club, and Sabers in the Wind, a novel about the forced repatriation of the Cossacks. He divides his time between Washington, D.C., and Clearwater Beach, Florida.

Table of Contents

List of Photographs
List of Maps
1. An Old-Fashioned Hero
2. Back in Harness
3. Days of Empire
4. The Cat Has Jumped
5. A Bold Gamble
6. A Symbol of Forlorn Hope
7. And Nobody Gives a Damn
8. The End Here Will be Brutal and Bloody
9. They Are Leaving Us One by One
10. The Troops on Bataan are Fast Folding Up
11. All Hell's Gonna Break Loose
12. Goodbye, Mr. President
13. I Have Taken a Dreadful Step
14. Sold Down the River
15. I Am Hungry All the Time
16. How Long, Oh Lord, How Long?
17. Day of Glory
18. Alone in His Hero's Cage
Wainwright's People
Acknowledgements
Sources
Notes
Index

The Fashionista's Book of Enlightenment by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana (Poetry Book)

The Fashionista's Book of Enlightenment is a collection of poems by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana that was published in 2009 by Designed by Words Co. The collection contains 43 poems. Some of the poems have been previously published in other publications and anthologies (i.e. Ani, At Home in Unhomeliness, Dark Blue Southern Seas, Ladlad 3, Likhaan 3, Montage, Philippines Free Press, Tomas).

Reviews:

"This fine collection of forty-three poems is a gathering of odes and elegies to the grand frailties of the world: from missed relatives and pets, visited cities, to the many failures of the body as it continues enduring the daily grind of modern city-living. The poems in The Fashionista's Book of Enlightenment are driven by a formal, often detached (half-mocking?) tone that meticulously details chance encounters with strangers and instances of intimacy. Daoana delights in chronicling the many posturing and elaborate decorations of the high society, and is openly scornful at the artificial and heavily made-up. From couplets to experimentations with the prose-poem form, this book offers myriad themes that mostly revolve around a hunger for cleansing, an envy of angels, and a wanting for quieter evenings. Yet these poems are never insistent on lower volumes and change; they simply - and all-too-humanly - remain steadfastly watchful of little kindness." - Joel M. Toledo

"In The Fashionista's Book of Enlightenment we find one of the top poetic voices of the post People Power Revolution. The nuances of serene images like "The clouds hang low, bruise the tip/ Of the mountain, which, oddly, is chiseled/In such a way that the left slope looks like/Cragged ladder, broken teeth, an angle of anguish," fill the book with Byronic beauty with indigenous flair. If I were to pin my hopes on the future of Filipino poetry, Carlomar Arcangel Daoana's name would be amongst the top three. This book should be on the book shelves of serious readers of our contemporary poetry." - Nick Carbo

"Among our finest poets writing today - Carlomar Arcangel Daoana: in such poems as "Mending" and "Surrender", there throbs, beneath the casual intimacy of the considering eye and the tender feeling, a deep sense of the world's sorrow and calm, harm and care, doom and certainty." - Gemino H. Abad

Here are two poems from the collection:

Octopus

A male octopus travels an ocean
To have an embrace with his kind.
The tentacles know what to do
And soon the gaps are sealed as
If to say: nothing else but hunger.

The whirling in the depths is
A hopeless dance. No baby
Octopus shall swim in the ocean
Because of this love. As if to say:
Sacrifices is its own enduring gift.

The grip happens in darkness,
Ours, and we smell the ocean.
I knock on the door of your body
With a question: Who are you
In these ridiculously mortal clothes?

It took you half a road to enter
My bed, half a second to kiss me.
What dangerous hunger we have.
We descend into the doom -
A wreckage - arms locked.

Prayer

At this edge (must be), the altar of the world
(Given), a pile of words and significances tight
As house, light-ambushed and rain-cohered,
I invoke your pure delight and luminosity, boy
In a red jacket, registering as both breath and
Emergency, as the bus dips - sideways -
Into the three o'clock road. See you neither
Falling nor swimming in the fog, simply,
Standing and staring with no heft of purpose,
Just gazing, marvelously, letting time precipitate
As your slow body tilts toward the dissolved:
Landscape bereft of contradictions. I call to you
Instead of the muse, not just because we share
The same millennium, the same hollowed-out
Clouds of the unhinged city, but because -
Let me put it this way: You venerate lostness.
You know how to stop, and stopping, the blur
Is summoned from the details, and the unknown
Rolls like the spokes of white wheels, and
Something gets polished inside you and what shines
Is a small, incalculable belief in the little bit.
This morsel is what sustains me so the words
May come with blood in them - reprehensible,
Inert in many ways, hopefully human. As for you:
A revelation of salt, earth and the curved sky
Hiding beneath all this white. So bless me.
Restore me to my edgedness. Intervene
Against the wind shutting down flames and
Roses in my head. As soon as I hit forehead
Against the page, you should have known:
That I write because you exist on the other side,
Smoldering with a life that stays put (the way
You want it) complete and incomparable
In the total mist, needing me not one bit.