Panther Soup
A European Journey in War and Peace
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
By the end of World War II much of Western Europe was in chaos. The future of our world had been contested here, in the hinterlands of France and across the German plains. But what's become of the battlefields now? Or the people that lived on them? And is there any trace of the 2.7 million Americans who smashed their way into the Reich (or the 12 million that followed)? With questions like these, the award-winning travel writer John Gimlette, guided by WWII veteran Putnam Flint, sets off on an astonishing journey into the past.
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Overlong and slyly self-important, travel writer Gimlette's third book takes the recollections of WWII veteran Putnam Flint and combines them with Gimlette's own European tour for a then-and-now travelogue that doesn't ever quite connect. Flint, an 86-year-old Bostonian who traveled from Provence to Austria with his tank destroyer battalion during the closing days of the war, is winning, inquisitive and has a writer's gift for precise language, telling Gimlette, "In combat, you hear guns, and it's like a musical score. The story unrolls from there." Unfortunately, Gimlette can't help but stretch the metaphor to the breaking point: "In Flint's case, it was a complex score, and no two recitals were ever quite the same." The two-thirds spent with Gimlette's own travels are often tedious; he has a fondness for looking for old brothels and new strip clubs, and a heavy hand with generalizations: "For the French, culture is duty, for the Americans it's pleasure." The combination of Gimlette's fatuous modern opinions and a tense historical memoir never quite gels; Flint's worthwhile stories deserve better. Illustrations.
