- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Key Porter Books (Sep 12 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1552632466
- ISBN-13: 978-1552632468
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 463 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #175,671 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
War is hell, the adage goes. "So awful," Farley Mowat adds in this memoir of World War II frontline service, "that through three decades I kept the deeper agonies of it wrapped in the cotton-wool of protective forgetfulness, and would have been well content to leave them buried so forever." Turned away from the Royal Canadian Air Force for his apparent youth and frailness (though, he writes, he had been living off the Saskatchewan countryside and was in fine shape), Mowat joined the infantry in 1940. The baby-faced second lieutenant quickly earned the trust of the soldiers under his command, especially when, as he gleefully recounts, he bent army rules to suit such exigencies of the field as securing a stout drink and finding warm, if non-regulation, clothing. Somewhat happy-go-lucky at the outset, Mowat and his colleagues soon adopted a darker view of the war after engaging elite German forces in the mountains of Sicily.
Ever the naturalist, Mowat recalls that he learned to identify German weapons by their sounds, "a discovery which excited me almost as much as if I had stumbled on a batch of new bird species." But the war was no game, and Mowat's memoir grows ever more sombre as friends and compatriots fall, one by one, to enemy fire and illness. His book, a graceful work of personal history, does his fellow warriors honour even as it protests the madness and destruction of war. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
Review
There is a deceptive quiet to the beginning of this recollection by Farley Mowat of the hell he and his comrades endured in the bloody Sicilian and Italian campaigns of World War II. And the undersized, baby-faced young man the author was three decades ago, eager to "get a damn good lick in at the Hun," seems, in the first few pages, unendurably callow, striking attitudes as false and dated as his slang. But he grows up fast and the battles he survived as a second lieutenant in the Canadian infantry are clamorously, jarringly real - justifying epigraphs from Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden. In 1940 at age 19 Mowat joined his father's old outfit, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, known as the Hasty Pees and made up of men from southeastern Ontario. A bird-watcher and something of a loner, he ends up in command of a platoon of hard cases and misfits, a iamb among lions. They were thrown into the invasion of Sicily in July of 1943 and Mowat soon loses the illusion that war is little more than an exciting form of battle game. "For the first time," he writes laconically, "I truly understood that the dead were dead." Then, as the Canadians are put through the meat grinder attempting to storm a German mountain-top fortress, he comes to know an unshakable fear; each time he finds it a little harder to blind himself to the death or mutilation he is certain awaits him. Mowat not only gets his emotional responses right, but he also makes the actual battle operations intelligible. A memorable book from a practiced hand. (Kirkus Reviews)
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Coming of age during a world war,
By A Customer
This review is from: And No Birds Sang (Mass Market Paperback)
Farley Mowat has entertained many readers like me for many years with lots of books. His story of his life as a soldier during WW 2 comes as no surprise. Now it is fashionable in America to talk of post traumatic stress disorder but the same conditions have existed on every battlefield from the beginning of time. Mowat vividly brings them to life as many writers of wartime do. This is an intensly personal and moving story and should be required reading for every 17 year old itching to go into the army. The title is especially evocative since Mowat is a naturalist and everywhere he goes, he looks for local birds. In spite of being in an exotic place, he would collect no new species there
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic retelling of a Canadians life in WWII,
By Woman Pleaser (Winnipeg, MB - Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: And No Birds Sang (Paperback)
I bought this book almost in a state of doubt. I had seen the name Farley Mowat and automatically assumed it was a good piece of writing as is most if not all of his other pieces of work. He is perhaps one if not the best Canadian writer ever to pick up a pen and paper. And after reading this book, i quickly realized why. I had been searching for a book that could possibly inform and educate me on a Canadian's standpoint of the second world war. I quickly realized that I had picked out a good book. It puts you in the mind of a young man reaching adulthood and as had every other young man at the time, had his mind set in joining his fellow Canadians and Allies in the battle. This mindframe had been to be fairly excited and actually happy to go to the frontlines. As it had obviously not been programmed to the unfortunate reality of the war itself. Farley Mowat tells a great and wonderful story of his life before and during the timeline of the Canadian military's part in the war itself. Whether it was the obvious anxiety of waiting to be shipped overseas to the frontlines, or the brutal and graphic reality of the battle itself, Mowat unveils a true and dramtically emotional story of World War II. Myself I was seaching for a book such as this one. It retold the historically correct graphic and terrifying nature of war, more specifically that of the Second World War. I know that one such as myself will never know and hopefully never experience the reality of war but, I can honestly say that I have infinite gratitude and thanks for those who fought for our freedom. All in all, a WONDERFUL book and I highly recommend it to any Farley Mowat fans or anyone who likes great historical literature. I just cannot seem to express how great of a book this really was. Hope you like it too!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hard to Put Down.,
This review is from: And No Birds Sang (Paperback)
Without a doubt, this book is the best written account of aCanadian soldier's exploits in WW 2. It holds your interest right from the start, when as a young man he enlists in the Canadian armed forces as a "glamorous adventure", and continues to hold your interest to the very end, when as a combat veteran he realizes that war is no game - it's a dirty, bloody, horrifying business. He takes you along for the ride : you are there in the midst of the carnage & madness they call war. A visceral experience you won't soon forget.
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