A book that one of my favourite students got for me (and damn, I like that so much more than a bottle of wine!) as he came to visit me on his way to Antarctica.
I suspect the construction of the Burma Railway is something that most Australians are at least reasonably familiar with, but for an Italian it remains something shrouded in a bit of mystery and something I really didn't know much about beyond what The Bridge on the River Kwai left me with (and to think that I'm a historian!).
Perhaps unusually, I feel that the parts of it that will
stay with me the longest will not be the ones set in Burma, but rather the
final chapters covering the lives of the survivors and the lasting impact of
the war. I can’t quite figure out why (perhaps because war and its atrocities
are way more often covered in works of fiction than the long-term personal
implications of conflict?), but it’s quite similar to how I felt about watching
The
Best Years of Our Lives (which I was mind-blown by).
Yet, despite liking the book and having finished it months ago, it is still resting on my bedside table - proof of the fact that perhaps I should consider getting a bigger bookshelf, as I can't quite figure out what book to remove to make space for this one.
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