Brendan I. Koerner reads Now the Hell Will Start October 30, 2008

Now the Hell Will Start tells the remarkable tale of Herman Perry, a smooth playboy from the streets of Washington, DC, who wound up living with a hill tribe in the Indo-Burmese jungle to escape the United States Army’s greatest manhunt during World War II. Perry was one of thousands of black soldiers dispatched to build the Ledo Road, a jungle highway beset by monsoons, malaria and flesh-eating insects. Perry collapsed under the jungle's brutality and the Jim Crow Army. When he shot and killed a white officer, Perry fled into the jungle. Deep in the forest, he married the daughter of the chief of a fearsome tribe of headhunters. Local black soldiers called him the Jungle King.

Starting off with nothing more than a ten-word snippet culled from an obscure bibliography, Koerner spent nearly five years chasing Perry's ghost. Koerner is a New York-based journalist, Wired contributing editor and an columnist at Slate and Gizmodo.

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