My Father’s Son. About the book:
In the summer of 1943, a young Canadian infantry lieutenant – who would survive the war to become a world-famous writer – landed on the beaches of Sicily as part of the allied assault on Western Europe. For a year and a half his division fought its way up the Italian “boot” in a series of savage and bloody battles, driving the German army slowly northward. As Farley Mowat saw his comrades killed and maimed in battle, his courage and convictions were sorely tested. But his spirit was sustained, in part, by his powerful relationship with his parents, especially his father, Angus Mowat, a wounded veteran of World War I, whose hundreds of letters combined an instinctive irreverence for authority with an enormous reverence for life – and an infectious belief in the power of the written word.