Celia Lucas

I chose this book because I had read "Rescue at Los Banos" in May and about Davao immediately after, and wanted to know about Santo Tomas, purportedly the largest of the Japanese Internment Camps in the Philippines. The author primarily used the numerous war diaries of Isla Corfield, who was interned with her 14-year-old daughter, Gill. The book is divided into chapters in consecutive date ranges, which allowed her to organize the material in the best way for the reader, probably without boring us with the repetitions of the same kind of thing being recited day after day when things are unchanging. Isla Corfield not only related her own problems of getting housing, food, clothing, but also relates her neighbors problems and their magnanimity or pettiness and their personalities, so that we had a real feeling for how hard it was day after day to endure the same people, the same arguments, the same problems without being able to get away from them, even for a short time. The author clearly sought out other sources when it came to the rescue at Los Banos because Isla would not have known most, if any, of it and that knowledge would be important to the reader to guage what a miracle the Americans and the guerillas pulled off. A worthy read.

Unfortunately, the Kindle edition of this book has many, many typographical errors in it. They were very annoying and unnecessary. It was as if the edition were OCR'd into ebook format and never cleaned up. Disgraceful.… (meer)