Who Walk Alone

Book excerpt: In the courage and unselfish love this book describes there is an inspiration for the world today. It is the story of Ned Langford, an ordinary young mid-western American who learned that something had happened to him, so terrible that it sent him into lifelong exile on a distant tropical island. The thing began, probably, in the years when young Ned served as a soldier in the Philippines, but he did not find out what had happened until years later. By that time he was launched in a happy, successful life—engaged to be married, and with a real standing in his community. How he found out the meaning of the places on his arm where there was no feeling, how he destroyed his own identity and went to the leper colony of Culion, how he came to terms with himself and built a new life, makes tremendous, dramatic reading which is doubly effective because Mr. Burgess has let Ned tell it in his own words. Ned Langford’s story is as triumphant as it is memorable and dramatic. Here is the story of a man who faced one of the ultimate of human disasters, and yet managed to wring from it a rich, useful, undaunted life. At the time of its first publication in 1940, Perry Burgess had been a national director of the Leonard Wood Memorial (American Leprosy Foundation) for fifteen years, and the president and executive officer of that foundation for the last decade. His work has taken him to leprosaria all over the world. He presents the factual background of the disease in an authoritative appendix to this volume, a supplement that removes the misconceptions about leprosy which exist in the minds of many people. Richly illustrated throughout with photographs drawn from the files of the Memorial. “Told with amazing sincerity and restraint. It is a true story of gallantry, suffering, triumph, victory of the spirit. It is inspiring....”—Robert M. Green in the Boston Evening Transcript. “A gentle and profoundly affecting story.”—The New Yorker.