The Last Ring Home
Traveling forty thousand miles and inspiring love and despair in equal measure, Lt. Minter Dial’s lost Annapolis ring altered the lives of many—not just those who gazed upon its blue stone.
The subject of an award-winning documentary film that was broadcast nationally on PBS and History Channel (ANZ), The Last Ring Home is a spellbinding account of one man’s obsession with a family mystery—and the product of decades of research and inquiries. The book relates author Minter Dial’s pursuit of the true story of his namesake, his late grandfather Lt. Minter Dial, USN, a celebrated war hero whose suffering and trauma nearly buried his memory forever.
A prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, Lt. Dial discovered the cruelest meaning of the Bushido code. Moments before he was killed, he gave his treasured Naval Academy ring to a friend. In the ensuing chaos, it disappeared.
Armed with a passion for history and a desire to uncover his grandfather’s legacy, Dial’s epic quest for the ring transports him to prisoner-of-war memorials and ex-POW conventions, military and press archives, and the homes of those affected by the Second World War across the world.
Sweeping as far back as the American Civil War, The Last Ring Home combines rigorous research with more than one hundred interviews with experts, survivors, and descendants of the Greatest Generation to tell the powerful story of American prisoners of war in the Pacific.
The documentary film continues to be screened at events and aired on PBS and will shortly be available on VOD worldwide, with a tag for the book.
Minter Dial
Minter Dial is a professional speaker, history fanatic, and president and founder of Digitalproof Consultancy, a strategic firm providing digital and brand consulting to clients including Kering Group, Samsung, Google and L’Ore´al. He's also author of Futureproof, How to get your business ready for the next disruption (Pearson-FT Press Sep 2017). Alumni of Eton College, he received his BA in Trilingual Literature from Yale University and earned his MBA at INSEAD (Fontainebleau).
- COMPANION PBS DOCUMENTARY: Publication will be timed to coincide with the launch of a half-hour documentary film, directed by Josh Shelov, which will be aired on PBS this fall (WHYY and MPT). Projected audience numbers are 3 million. It will also be aired on FOXTEL in Australia and New Zealand (>200K). FIlm was selected for the South Carolina International Film Festival.
- VETERANS DAY TIE-IN: The book will be published November 5, to maximize the media opportunities around Veterans Day.
- TARGETED EVENTS: The author is planning events at the Annapolis Naval Academy (MD), WWII Museum (VA), MacArthur War Museum, and other strategic locations to garner interest among veterans and current service people.
- AUTHOR’S MARKETING EXPERTISE: An expert in new technologies, Dial has more than 20 years of experience driving branding, marketing, and innovation at blue-chip firms such as L’Oréal, Redken, Samsung, and Total. Dial will draw on this expertise and activate his many high-profile contacts to build word-of-mouth for the book this fall.
- SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWING: Dial will leverage his significant social media following through both corporate profiles and book- and film- specific ones; his platform includes 1.3 million Google+ hits to-date, 89,000 total views on Slideshare presentations, 500 regular podcast listeners, and 14,000 active blog readers.
- REWARD FOR THE RING: The author is offering a $10,000 reward to the next finder of the lost ring, which will encourage word-of-mouth readership while serving as a media hook for the book.
- HISTORY / Military/ World War II (HIS027100)
- HISTORY / Military/ United States (HIS027110)
- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs (BIO026000)
