"To End All Wars"

You MUST read this book. I wouldn't hesitate to label it was one of the best books I've ever read; worth every minute you would spend reading it. It has challenged me time and time again by it's true stories of self sacrificing love and perseverance, and the eternal impact they bring.

Author and WWII prison camp survivor Ernest Gordan recounts stories from his prison camp where at first nothing but death and despair ruled. The overworked prisoners were only concerned about their own problems and couldn't care less about their fellows suffering around them. Then, mysteriously, stories of selfless love start infiltrating the camp and gradually, revival breaks out. Soon there is instance upon instance where battered men arrive at the prison camp in complete despair and hope for nothing but death, until a fellow POW, suffering from the same inhumane conditions, reaches out to them and miraculously revives in them fresh reason to live through the power of Christ. The whole mindset of the camp shifts from death to life. Lives are drastically changed because one POW realizes he is living his last days on earth and begins investing every spare moment in the service of his ailing friends, doing even the repulsive jobs everyone else ignores. These stories are incredible. I can't encourage you enough to read this book. I guarantee you will not regret it.

"The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living and die of despair. The Infinite and the Eternal are as essential for man as the little planet on which he dwells." -Dostoevski, The Possessed