Michael Norman

MICHAEL Norman has been a professional writer and journalist (including a correspondent for the New York Times) for thirty-five years. His first book, "These Good Men: Friendships Forged From War," a memoir published to critical acclaim in 1990 by Crown, turned on his time as a combat Marine in Vietnam. He is currently a tenured professor of narrative journalism in the Literary Reportage Program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Michael thinks of himself as a non-fiction story teller, a writer who collects the thousands of details necessary to make a true story come to life on the page. For "Tears In The Darkness: The Story of The Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath," he as his co-author, his wife, Elizabeth M. Norman, interviewed more than 400 people, among them former soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army and scores of Filipinos who witnessed the death march. The Normans traveled to Asia four times across ten years and collected some 2,800 books, documents, photographs and other material from archives around the world to complete the story of Bataan and the death march and to make it a three-dimensional experience for the reader. Michael and co-author Elizabeth Norman spent ten years researching and interviewing for "Tears In The Darkness." They made four trips to Asia and crossed America several times for the book. They have two grown sons, Joshua and Benjamin, and a grand-daughter, Florence Norman. For most of their married life, the Normans have lived in Montclair N. J.