About this item
Ernie Coleman survived the worst open-sea defeat in US Navy history. But he paid a price and buried the horrific memories for decades.In the manner of Mitch Albom's highly successful Tuesdays with Morrie, 22 Minutes is a searing account of a survivor coming to terms with an incident he had suppressed for sixty years and the writer who painstakingly put together the clues about what had happened.Author Jeff Spevak was confronted with a dilemma: How do you tell the story of a man who can't bring himself to talk about the most epic moment of his life? A clever fellow who'd scrapped to survive in a fashion that seems quaint today, Coleman tested himself as a teenager by swimming across lakes, building homes from foraged lumber, running a Navy carpentry shop as though he were a member of the scamming crew of McHale's Navy.