The Curse of Nonfiction strikes again: fascinating topic, dry book.

An account of pioneering burn surgeon Archibald McIndoe and The Guinea Pig Club, a group of badly burned WWII airmen who he treated in a small hospital in England. McIndoe not only revolutionized techniques for treating and reconstructing burn injuries, he also helped the men ( Read more... )

The memoir of a WWII fighter pilot who was shot down, badly burned, had his face and hands reconstructed, and then somehow managed to finagle his way back into being a pilot, where he was promptly killed in a training accident (I really hope not because he was, in fact, no longer fit to fly); this book came out three months before his death, so at ( Read more... )

From the first chapter of the memoir of a WWII fighter pilot; he has just gone down in flames, and is floating in the ocean, badly burned and alone:

There can be few more futile pastimes than yelling for help alone in the North Sea, with a solitary seagull for company, yet it gave me a certain melancholy satisfaction, for I had once written a ( Read more... )

Nonfiction about a brief but fateful encounter between a German ace fighter pilot and an American bomber crew, in mid-air; forty years later, the two pilots met up again. The book started out as a magazine article, and I bet it was a terrific one. It’s a great story and unlike many WWII stories, this one is about people’s best behavior rather than ( Read more... )

I’m afraid I did not like this at all. In fact, it was the first FMK book that I didn’t finish-I ditched it at about the halfway mark. And it’s a very short book, too: 133 pages ( Read more... )

The blurb writer was confused; this is not a Gothic, but a regency. However, it does briefly turn into a Gothic for about ten pages toward the end, so I see how that could happen. I too struggled to categorize it, as, unsurprisingly considering the author, it's hard to categorize. It has the plot but not the substance of a romance; the heroine only ( Read more... )

On the excellent rec of
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By the author of National Velvet, which if you’ve never read it is a quite unusual book with a distinctive prose style and atmosphere that I find quite lovely, especially at the beginning. It doesn’t read at all like your typical girls-and-horses book, though it is that as well.

A Diary Without Dates is Bagnold’s memoir of nursing soldiers during ( Read more... )

[Rachel: But first, a little set-up ( Read more... )

[Rachel: But of course, Burr’s luck does not last for long ( Read more... )