Author Visit: John Armbruster

Join us for a presentation and conversation about the stellar and top circulating book, Tailspin.

Book Information: In November 1943, in the skies over Nazi Germany, a wounded American tail gunner, Gene Moran, lay in the severed tail of his Flying Fortress bomber. The mangled wreckage plunged four miles toward German soil.  His parachute shredded by enemy fire, Gene awaited the inevitable. The cartwheeling tail section slammed into a forest and dumped Gene onto the cold ground.  He was alive!  Gene fell four miles without a parachute and survived.  But his ordeal had just begun.  In the next seventeen months, Gene would endure some of the worst episodes of the American prisoner of war experience in occupied Europe, including the infamous "Hell Ship" and European Death March. For more than sixty years, Gene said little about one of the most extraordinary stories of World War II until he met the author, John Armbruster.  

Author Biography: John Armbruster remembers admiring the Flying Fortress airplane when he was nine years old after reading his first "grown up" book: Flying Fortress-The Illustrated Biography of the B-17s and the Men Who Flew Them. Today, a copy of that book sits on a shelf in John's home.  Who could have guessed this World War II airplane buff would one day befriend a Flying Fortress tail gunner and write his story? The author earned a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and began his career writing environmental science stories for EarthwatchRadio (Sea Grant-University of Wisconsin).  He later wrote for two Wisconsin newspapers covering general assignment news for the La Crosse Tribune, and later, writing sports stories for the Marshfield News-Herald. John returned to UW-Madison and earned his secondary education degree-social studies.  He later completed a masters of education degree at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin.  Since 1993, John has taught a variety of history and government courses to middle and high school students, including Advanced Placement courses in American and European history.