So, I was telling you about this book...

"My Faraway Home" by Mary Mckay Maynard. It made me think of the novel, "A Town Like Alice" by Nevil Shute, except this is a memoir written years after the events; amazingly, the author maintains her sense of wide-eyed wonder at all that was happening around her; circumstances she has no control over. Like a child holocaust survivor's account, only in the tropical jungle.

And, Family, the author actually knew our Uncle Fred Feigel! He was the assistant to her father in the operation of the Mother Lode Gold Mine on Mindanao! I found the book by googling Fred's name one evening a month or so ago. She knew Aunt Jean, Fred's wife, too. Amazingly small world, sometimes. I'd heard about the submarine rescue of Jean, and this book tells the exciting story of how all that went down. They had all been stranded due to the Japanese attacks all over the Pacific that included Pearl Harbor--by coincidence, the anniversary today--and had to hide out at the company's remote mining camp. Had they been found, they all would likely have been killed. Several of the men, including Fred, were eventually killed by the Japanese.