Lonesome Road Author:George Harsh He was a rich kid who had gone wrong...who had gunned down a man in a holdup pulled just for kicks. This book is Harsh's brutal description of his odyssey through the horrors of the chain gang and, later, a Nazi prison camp. On the chain gang prisoners were not rehabilitated, they were worked to death; and only the toughest survived long. Har... more »sh learned to wield a shovel for fourteen hours in the Georgia sun; to sleep in a urine-stinking iron cage; to fight off sexual attacks with his fists or, if necessary, with a knife. When he stepped out of line he was beaten unconscious or put into a box so small he could neither sit or stand. He won the respect of his fellow cons by killing another prisoner in a fight over a stolen bar of soap. Harsh records every detail of this appalling existence and colors nothing. He also describes the warped, lost souls who were his companions: rapists, homicidal maniacs, even an unfrocked Jesuit, whom he helped to escape. After serving twelve years of a life sentence Harsh saved the life of a prisoner by performing an improvised appendectomy and, as a result, was pardoned. Less than a year later he found himself a commissioned officer and "gentleman" in the Royal Canadian Air Force flying combat missions over Germany. Then on the night of October 5, 1942, he was shot down and spent the remainder of the war in Stalag Luft III, the camp from which the "Great Escape" was engineered. He was a prime mover in that adventure.« less