Wish my grandfather at Happy 85th Birthday!

Today is my grandfather's 85th birthday! Isn't that awesome? I'm going to see him tonight and hear him speak at West Point tomorrow.

Do YOU want to wish him a Happy Birthday? Well, if you do, you can email me (rachelkb at gmail.com) your birthday wishes and I'll pass them on.

But you know what would be really awesome? If you pre-ordered his memoir My Private War: Liberated Body, Captive Mind: A WWII POW's Story. (out next month) or sent it as a gift to someone. It's really extraordinary and I'm so proud of him. Much more on that in the coming months, and I will of course let you know when he's reading in NYC.



You can read an excerpt at Memoirville. Here's the start of the excerpt:

On April 29, 1944, my B-17 Bomber crew flew a fatal mission from Rattlesden, England to Berlin. Four members of our crew were killed that day. Six of us survived and became prisoners of war for a year.

I promised myself that if I were lucky enough to return home, I would write a detailed account of this calamitous event so that the families of those who were killed would know exactly what happened to their loved ones on that fateful day.

More than 60 years have now passed, but I have been unable to set forth a single word about that mission, although the minutiae are still as vivid in my mind as ever.

Keep reading

Great review of my grandfather's WWII POW memoir

Check out this AWESOME review from Kirkus of my grandfather's memoir! Which you can pre-order now. You can read an excerpt at Memoirville.

Bussel, Norman
MY PRIVATE WAR: Liberated Body, Captive Mind: A World War II POW’S Journey

One of the Greatest Generation writes affectingly of a long life spent wrestling with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Prisoners of war, Bussel notes, suffer disproportionately from heart attacks in old age, as well as various autoimmune illnesses—all maladies attributable in some measure to stress and anger. Shot down over Germany in 1944, Bussel, then 19, was shipped off to a POW camp on the shore of the Baltic Sea and was subjected to the usual indignities. His Nazi captors never discovered that he was Jewish, though, and he had something of a protector in a fatherly German guard who “made some everlasting changes in the way I look at the world.” The early pages of this memoir echo the work of Neil Simon, if with a slightly more exacting view of military medical inspections. Bussel writes with good humor about life in boot camp and specialist training, of minor insurrections and tensions among the enlisted and of his coming of age courtesy of a Florida ballerina turned stripper. (He ruefully reflects that he had forgotten to take along the lucky bra she had given him on the day his bomber was brought down.) Bussel told his family that he would return if the military sent them a notice that he was missing in action, and he lived up to his word. Yet he returned changed—and to a nation that was ever so slightly afraid of him. (He was turned down for a job for which he was perfectly suited because, the interviewer said, “my boss reads that you were a POW, he’s going to think I hired a loony.”) Bussel writes clearly and authentically about the various manifestations of what used to be called shell shock: anger, irritability, confusion, claustrophobia and years of attempts at self-medication before finding support and sobriety.

An honest account of matters once considered embarrassing—and much more common than civilians might realize, as a new generation of veterans is discovering.