Yes, More Books...

I'll cover a couple here, my two most recent:

Battleship Sailor, by Mason, T.

A captivating read about a young American who joins the US Navy a year before Pearl Harbor, experiencing the last year of the “battleship navy” - a time when battleships were considered the backbone of any and all navies of the world. (Well, the Japanese and the British were starting to figure that out.) The climax of that line of thinking comes to a crescendo at the end of the book - but it’s mostly about a young guy making friends, learning about the navy, enjoying “liberty”, learning how to handle himself in a barroom brawl, and growing up in the US Navy in 1940 through 1941. The book is filled with anecdotes foreshadowing the events of December 7th, 1941, including the death of several friends, his best friend among them, and his feeling towards many officers, who failed him and his mates on that fateful day. It is well written and engaging throughout; I'll be ordering his follow-up book at some point.

Recommended for people interested in that time and place in history.

7/10

Tale of a Guinea Pig, by Page, G.

The memoirs of a WW2 fighter pilot in the RAF. The title is a tell of his unwilling participation in the burn recovery wards in British hospitals that ramped up at the beginning of the conflict. Not that there was anything wrong with those treatments - they were cutting edge, and on the whole, very successful. In fact, the best plastic surgeons in the British Isles were assigned to these efforts. However, from the perspective of someone who was horribly burned, his first-hand knowledge of the pain involved - in both the healing process, and the surgeries that gave them back varying degrees of normal appearances - gave the ‘guinea pig’ term a definitely significant meaning. The first half of the book covers his entry into the RAF, and his first successes in the air; that ends with an ill-fated mission using questionable tactics (not his) that got him shot down. The unprotected fuel tank right in front of the pilot in the Hurricane fighter plane was blamed (by the author) as the cause of his anguish. A great deal of detail regarding his burn treatments and many surgeries follows, naturally. He does recover for the most part, becomes triple ace, and gets promoted to Wing Commander - no doubt due to his survivability, enhanced in no small part by his down time in the various burn wards. The book has its slow parts, but there are more than a few very descriptive and exciting flying scenes that would appeal to many with those interests. Interestingly (mildly), he ends up marrying the daughter of Nigel Bruce, the actor who played the bumbling Dr. Watson in the old Sherlock Holmes movies in the 1940s.

6/10