Marcus Nannini
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Mr. Nannini began his writing career when he published his own newspaper in the sixth grade and charged 25 cents per school quarter for the privilege of reading the only hand-written copy of each edition.
During the 8th grade his English teacher took him aside and said while she very much enjoyed his writing, he included too many details and that by doing so it distracted from his otherwise good storytelling. He took that lesson to heart. In the final month of his senior year in HS his English Comp teacher took him aside and told him that he already had developed a unique writing style and he should never let anyone try to change it. During his undergraduate years he was a paid newspaper reporter and also worked three semesters as the research assistant to journalism professor Richard Stocks Carlson, Ph.D. Dr. Carlson pointed to his sole published work, The Benign Humorists, and warned Nannini not to make the mistake he had committed by writing a book directed at a more “educated” market. Dr. Carlson advised Nannini to keep writing as an author who seeks to appeal to the mass-market reader. Nannini’s most recent work, LEFT FOR DEAD AT NIJMEGEN, The True Story of an American Paratrooper in World War II (Casemate Publishers, Oxford, UK and Philadelphia, PA) won the Pencraft Awards for best Nonfiction Book of 2019, was added to the United States National Archives in July, 2019 and has received acclaim from reviews in Germany, Holland, Great Britain and the USA. Nannini currently writes on a full-time basis. Look for more books from him in the near future along with articles he has composed for World War II History Magazine, History Magazine, Casemate Publishers UK-Blog and Military History Now Magazine. |
Left for Dead at Nijmegen, The True Story of an American Paratrooper in World War II
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WW II Biography
When Gene Metcalfe boarded the C-47 that would drop him just outside of Nijmegen, Holland, he was handed a box of 12 dozen condoms by an overconfident British lieutenant. He was among the first to jump into what should have been a picture-book meadow, free of Germans. Instead, he was greeted by bullets and exploding shells. When his plane rolled over and plummeted into the ground he realized the condoms had either been a bad joke or the planners of Operation Market Garden had seriously underestimated German resistance. Following an intense fire-fight his patrol left him for dead. A member of the notorious German “SS” discovered he was still alive and dragged him to be interrogated by the notorious Nazi, Heinrich Himmler. The rest of his story is equally gripping as he became a POW, risked his life to save that of another and was moved between various disease-ridden camps. Eventually, he made an escape only to be recaptured within sight of the snow-capped Swiss mountains. The battle scenes are described with sufficient detail to put the reader on the edge of their seat without being outright gruesome. Metcalfe witnesses murder on both an individual scale and by the hundreds-at-a-time.
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