This is the story of one soldier- what his life was before World War II, what he went through to survive the savage treatment of the Japanese during the Bataan Death March and 31/2 years as a POW, and his struggle to live a normal life when he returned to his wife and daughter after the defeat of and liberation from his Japanese captors. During World War II, one of twenty-five POWs in Europe died as prisoners of the Germans, while one of three POWs in the South Pacific died as prisoners of the Japanese. For the 200th CA (AA) from New Mexico, this number was one of two.

In December of 1940, Morgan Thomas Jones, Jr. enlists in the New Mexico National Guard. He ends up serving more than five years in the Army--mostly as a Japanese prisoner of war. This memoir is one of the last written accounts of an American who survived the defense of the Philippines and the Bataan Death March.

In this superbly researched WWII novel, award-winning writer, Tori Warner Shepard, captures the mood of remote Santa Fe, New Mexico as it waits out WWII for the return of her men held in Japanese prison camps. POW Melo Garcia has survived the Bataan Death March in the Philippines but his brother and father have not. Along with 1,500 other American prisoners, he is diseased, tortured, starved, and used as slave labor in a condemned coal mine outside of Nagasaki, Japan. Melo is the last living hope to continue his family's centuries old line for his war-widowed mother, Nicasia, who prays for his return alongside his sweetheart, LaBelle. They have received no reliable news since the surrender to the enemy in 1942. The novel is as much a story of the men's heroism as it is of their Hispanic community which after Pearl Harbor was a distant and a safe refuge from the war, sought out by the US Government as an internment camp for 2,000 Japanese “Isseii” barely a mile from the office of the top-secret Manhattan Project that was developing the atomic bomb to be dropped 20 miles from Melo's prison camp. Add to the mix FBI and counter-intelligence agents, Gringo fanatics opposed to Roosevelt, Melo's “novia” LaBelle and Phyllis, the redheaded bombshell, who challenges her. And Melo himself with his mother who embodies “gracia,” a word that does not translate. This gripping exposition of the Japanese atrocities is even-handed and the characters and personalities on the home front will haunt your memory. TORI WARNER SHEPARD grew up in post-war Japan and since moving to Santa Fe over thirty-five years ago has been absorbed by the story of the POWs, their welcome home, and the effects of the war on a tight isolated community. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing which she has taught, and has published poetry, articles and short stories. Winner of the Mountainland Award for Contemporary Fiction, she has three grown children and lives with her husband in an old adobe.

Bataan, the last bastion stemming the Japanese tidal wave across the Pacific, was about to fall. Only one unit, ROld Two Hon'erd," a small band of New Mexico National Guardsmen, remained intact. In her award-winning history, Dorothy Cave follows the members of this small unit who played a key role in this pivotal moment in history.

"Radiation is a complex and paradoxical concept: staggering amounts of energy flow from seemingly inert rock and that energy is both useful and dangerous. While nuclear energy affects our everyday lives--from nuclear medicine and food irradiation to microwave technology--its invisible rays trigger biological damage, birth defects, and cellular mayhem. From the end of the nineteenth century through the use of the atomic bomb in World War II to the twenty-first century's confrontation with the dangers of nuclear power, Craig Nelson illuminates a pageant of fascinating historical figures: Enrico Fermi, Marie and Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein, FDR, Robert Oppenheimer, and Ronald Reagan, among others. He reveals many little-known details, including how Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler transformed America from a country that created light bulbs and telephones into one that split atoms; how the most grotesque weapon ever invented could realize Alfred Nobel's lifelong dream of global peace; how emergency workers and low-level utility employees fought to contain a run-amok nuclear reactor, while wondering if they would live or die. Brilliantly fascinating and remarkably accessible, The Age of Radiance traces mankind's complicated and difficult relationship with the dangerous power it discovered and made part of civilization"--

Shadows on the Land is the third and final volume of the Corrales Valley Trilogy. The story resumes near the turn of the twentieth century, and follows the final tragedy of the Bonneau brothers and the coming of age of Gaetano Perna. After being wounded in the trenches of France, young James Parrish returns home to marry lovely Emily MacKenzie. They move a small herd onto Corrales land and put down roots as the first Anglos in the village. With the help of her husband’s grizzled cowhands, Emily learns the ranching business. In the ‘20s and ‘30s, bootlegging and racial hatred impact upon the people of the village. Little Rueben, the lame son of Amos Apodaca is helped by the infamous Al Capone, while Gaetano Perna’s son, Santo, runs afoul of the ruthless Chicago gangster. The Parrish ranch is the scene of murderous vengeance as the Ku Klux Klan spread their message of hate and fear throughout the Southwest. Finally, there is the shock of Pearl Harbor. Young friends Joe Apodaca and Holt Parrish find themselves swept up in the horror of the Bataan Death March, while Holt’s younger brother, Lee, pilots a B-25 over the jungles of Burma, and crippled Rueben is an awed eyewitness to the dawn of the nuclear age in the desert wastes of Alamagordo.

For two weeks during the spring of 1942, the Bataan Death March--one of the most widely condemned atrocities of World War II--unfolded. The prevailing interpretation of this event is simple: American prisoners of war suffered cruel treatment at the hands of their Japanese captors while Filipinos, sympathetic to the Americans, looked on. Most survivors of the march wrote about their experiences decades after the war and a number of factors distorted their accounts. The crucial aspect of memory is central to this study--how it is constructed, by whom and for what purpose. This book questions the prevailing interpretation, reconsiders the actions of all three groups in their cultural contexts and suggests a far greater complexity. Among the conclusions is that violence on the march was largely the result of a clash of cultures--undisciplined, individualistic Americans encountered Japanese who valued order and form, while Filipinos were active, even ambitious, participants in the drama.