I have a big problem with the use of novels and fiction in general as replacement teaching aids for genuine scientific studies into the past.
What we're presented with in this example is folklore and myth, not history, it's an important distinction.
The facts of the first and second wars are virtually unknown in this country because no attempt has been made to teach them, the curriculum has always been centered on promoting "values" of one sort or another and fiction is the key vehicle for transferring those values.

Given the two unfortunate articles on the Forum today which whitewash Israel and try to find excuses for Abbott's mediocrity, this article is beautifully written and deals with aspects of nobility and creativity, scarce commodities indeed in Down Under and on OLO.

Susan writes superbly. I want to purchase the book she did. I'm sure it will clean my soul of some of the world's darkness though not all.

Anzac Day should be a celebration of Peace but politicians and the Military would be bereft if they couldn't suck on the teat of war each year!

We have followed the YU-SS-AA in its bizarre love affair with war and killing and torture I'm afraid.

Why do we in Australia always follow the LCD?

Anyway the book will uplift us for an hour or two. Then we will go back to our tellies and graze on tasteless, intellect-free bracken!

Don't panic about History, there are plenty academics to keep inventing histories for a long time yet.

The novel immediately brings to mind Lieutenant-Colonel E.E. ‘Weary’ Dunlop, although this may not be the author's intention, but his father may have known Dunlop and been treated by him.

Read Russell Braddon, "The Naked Island", first published 1952, Edinburgh, Berlinn Ltd, 2005, for an excellent first hand account of war and the Japanese in WW II.

This is the kind of review that makes me NOT want to read a book. It’s a pretentious review about what comes across as a pretentious novel.

Of course, novels that poetically enshrine the overwrought myth of the soldier-victim nobly wearied by war and duty, not to mention a lifetime of cluelessness about relating on any realistic level with women, are the stuff of reverence-on-cue-book-awards bait.

I feel an ABC mini-series coming on

"At his wife's urging, he confronts the man and they become friends."---the theme of the film is simply grotesque and nihilistic, during WW2 the Japanese were the Nazis of the Asia-Pacific.