(5 of 5)
When, after covering 1,000 miles in 34 days, the three men staggered ashore on an unknown island, Dixon remembered to outline a plan for avoiding possible Japanese sentries, and to seek out a strong mooring post for the precious raft. Even at that moment he was thinking ahead: if the place was dangerous, or uninhabited, they would rest up, scrape together provisions — and take to the raft again.
It is this quality that makes The Raft much more than another saga of human heroism of which there will be many before World War II ends. The special quality of this book is that it restores and documents by deed something that has long been lacking from men's books and minds — a sense of the therapeutic goodness of the unflagging will to live.
* A Southern name, used in the late Scott Fitzgerald's early stories, which best describes the gilded youths of that period.