By David Rogers. January 10, 2012. BLOWING ROCK – Two stories, both characterized by great accomplishments and horrific tragic circumstances. The Rotary Club of Blowing Rock was treated to book reviews by members Howard Williams and Cullie Tarleton on Monday, in the club’s first meeting of the new year at Chetola Mountain Resort & Spa, in Blowing Rock.

Madness, Medicine and Murder

While felled by a would-be assassin’s bullet, James Garfield, the 20^th U.S. President, may have actually been murdered by a primitive medical profession in 1881, suggested Williams in sharing his read of best-selling author Candice Millard’s DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (2011, Doubleday, New York).

Williams described Garfield’s abbreviated life journey: abject poverty and loss of his father at age 1;  working as a teenager on the Erie and Ohio canals; his emergence as an influential scholar and teacher after graduating from Williams College in 1856; his evolution as politician; his service as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War; and to his completing nine consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before being nominated by the Republican Party as a compromise choice for President after an unresolved three-way deadlock of former President Ulysses S. Grant, James G. Blaine, and John Sherman.

With sometimes graphic visualizations, Williams shared that after Garfield was shot by a rejected civil service office seeker, Charles J. Guiteau, at the Washington, D.C. train depot on July 2, 1881, his condition worsened with infection caused by non-sterile attempts by medical practitioners to reach into his body, find, and extract the bullets.

“He was an amazing man,” Williams said in wrapping up his review. “He had some unbelievable talents, and he would have made an enormous difference had he lived…but it was a life too short.”

The Resilience of the Human Mind, Body and Spirit

Tarleton reviewed Laura Hillenbrand’s #1 New York Times bestseller, Unbroken (2010, Random House, New York), the extraordinary odyssey of a young U.S. Army Air Force lieutenant in World War II, after the bomber for which he served as bombardier crashed in the Pacific Ocean.

The lieutenant, Louis Zamperini, had been an incorrigible delinquent in his youth, Tarleton described, but as a teenager had channeled his energy into running, for which it was discovered he had a prodigious talent.  It was a talent that would take him at age 19 to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, representing the United States.  Had his athletic career not been cut short by the war, Tarleton related, Zamperini may well have been the first to break the four-minute mile barrier.

Surviving the plane crash in the Pacific for 47 days and drifting more than 2,000 miles in a foundering raft with two other survivors (one of whom would die on the 33^rd day), Zamperini was captured by Japanese sailors.

“As a former Olympian,” observed Tarleton, “Louis was a valuable propaganda tool, too precious to kill…Occasionally (while in prison camps) he was made to run against the Japanese to prove (his captors’) superiority.  If he won, he was bludgeoned into unconsciousness…In POW camps he was subjected to an unrelenting pattern of assault, humiliation, starvation, medical experiments, slave labor, and disease…By the end of the war his life was hanging by a thread.”

Now 94 and still living, Tarleton noted that Zamperini had outlived all of his siblings and peers. “While he returned to the U.S. in 1945 and was celebrated as a hero,” Tarleton said, “his re-entry was clouded by nightmares, heavy drinking, flashbacks, rage, and an obsession with revenge. He credits a conversion at a revival in 1949, by a young Billy Graham, with turning his life around… ‘Unbroken’ is a great book and I highly recommend it.”

Another book review will be presented in the near future by Blowing Rock’s John Calvin.

The next Blowing Rock Rotary meetings and their programs are:

• January 16 – Catherine Scantlin, Health and Wellness Director of Chetola Spa
• January 23 – Jim West, “Navigating Rotary Information”
• January 30 – Tom Howe, Director and General Manager of UNC-TV, “Public Television in North Carolina”
• February 6 – Dr. Alan Singer, Holshouser Distinguished Professor of Ethics, Appalachian State University Walker College of Business, “Third World America vs. the T-Party: the Perspective from Corporate Strategy”

The Rotary Club of Blowing Rock meets at 11:45 am on Mondays, Chetola Mountain Resort & Spa, Blowing Rock.

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