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The Man From Swan Lake: Hero of the Cocoanut Grove Fire - The Clifford Johnson Story
Paperback
Publisher Price: $29.00
Publisher: Paul J Yovino
Published: Jun 29 2026
Pages: 262
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.55 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Some men are forged in fire. Others are reborn in the wild.
When twenty-year-old Coast Guardsman Clifford Cliffy Johnson walked into Boston's glamorous Cocoanut Grove nightclub on a crisp November night in 1942, he was just a young man looking for a beautiful evening. Moments later, the venue became an inferno. Trapped in America's deadliest nightclub fire, Cliffy chose heroism over survival. He plunged back into the suffocating smoke and screaming crowds again and again to pull strangers from the flames-until the fire claimed his own flesh, leaving him with burns over half his body.
He survived the unsurvivable, enduring agonizing, groundbreaking medical trials to piece his life back together. But a shattered body is easier to heal than a haunted soul.
Seeking sanctuary from the ghosts of that horrific night, Cliffy returns home to Missouri to become the game warden of the mystical Swan Lake Wildlife Refuge. He expects quiet isolation. Instead, he finds an injured swan he names Princess Odette From the Tchaikovsky ballet Swan Lake-a creature that mirrors his own broken elegance. As Cliffy fights to save her, the boundaries between his traumatic past and a mythical destiny begin to blur.
Can a man who walked through hell find salvation in the waters of Swan Lake, or will the ashes of the past finally consume him?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
PAUL YOVINO is a veteran radio host, executive producer, and college media instructor. A native of Quincy, Massachusetts, his deep sense of history was fostered early on-quite literally-as his childhood home was built on land once owned by John Adams. He is a graduate of Thayer Academy, the University of Massachusetts, and attended Suffolk University Law School.
The Man From Swan Lake is his second novel and a story he was born to tell. His late father, Emanuel Yovino, M.D., was a resident physician at Boston City Hospital during the tragic 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire. As part of the groundbreaking burn team that performed the world's first successful skin grafts, Dr. Yovino treated Clifford Johnson. Paul grew up hearing Cliffy Johnson's remarkable story at the dinner table and even met him as a young boy. Decades later, Yovino weaves history and personal legacy together to fully unveil this tragic, Tchaikovsky ballet like Swan Lake survival story for the very first time.
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