There I was standing in Sears waiting for my husband to pay for a couple of shirts and I started looking through the books that were in a box near the checkout. I looked at cookbooks which use only 4 ingredients and cookbooks which use Kraft Dinner and Jello (not in the same recipe I hope) and a book about Harley-Davidsons. Nothing that I would be remotely tempted by. And then, I see this book by Farley Mowat that I had never heard of, let alone read. Obviously, for $3.98 I wasn't going to leave it there with books that don't deserve to rub shoulders with a Mowat. Even though it took almost all my remaining cash, I bought it.

Every time I read a Farley Mowat book I am reminded again what a great writer he was. He was a great addition to the Canadian book scene and it is too bad he has finally gone to that great nature preserve in the sky (he died on May 6 2014). On the other hand he was so prolific that it will be a long time until I run out of his books and then I could start reading them over again.

This memoir captures a trip that Mowat made with his first wife Fran to Europe in 1952. He had received an advance to write a book about his army regiment, the Hastings and Prince Edward regiment. He decided to spend the whole advance by flying to England, buying a new car, and then travelling Europe revisiting the sites he had been with his regiment. If you know Mowat at all you can imagine that this trip involved lots of liquor and hijinks. It also has some of the most heart-wrenching accounts of the battles of World War II that I have ever read. The chapter about the resistance fighters in the Vercors region of France was enough to make me weep and that was all second-hand because Mowat had never been there during the war. When he talks about the battles he was actually in you can practically hear the bombs explode and the screams of the dying men.

Thanks Farley for showing us the world through your eyes.

I am going to reserve this book for the 2015 Canada Days release challenge.

I left this book on a locked chest in the shelter by the Kiwanis Dock. This release is for the 2015 Canada Days release challenge.