Customer Reviews
Courage in adversity - By: K. Plowman, 16 Dec 2007 
This is a beautifully written account of one pilot's participation in a crucial WW2 battle. The author spent only a relatively brief period in action; but his description of his privileged period at Oxford, & of fighter training at the beginning of World War 2, are worth reading in their own right.
However, the real subject of this book is the recovery (sadly incomplete) he made from the horrific burns suffered after being shot down on the first anniversary of the outbreak of War. Burns treatment was crude before the outbreak of WW2, & shot-down pilots were the guinea pigs who enabled huge advances in this field to be made. (Hillary's plastic surgeon was the great Sir Archibald McIndoe.) Hillary's courage in fighting his way to this recovery, & the candour with which he describes it, make this book the best memoir I have read of the War.
Battle of Britain and recovery - By: K. Plowman, 07 Jan 2005 This is a beautifully written account of one pilot's participation in a crucial WW2 battle. The author spent only a relatively brief period in action; but his description of his privileged period at Oxford, & of fighter training at the beginning of World War 2, are worth reading in their own right.
However, the real subject of this book is the recovery (sadly incomplete) he made from the horrific burns suffered after being shot down on the first anniversary of the outbreak of War. Burns treatment was crude before the outbreak of WW2, & shot-down pilots were the guinea pigs who enabled huge advances in this field to be made. (Hillary's plastic surgeon was the great Sir Archibald McIndoe.) Hillary's courage in fighting his way to this recovery, & the candour with which he describes it, make this book the best memoir I have read of the War.
A strangely willing guinea pig - By: Timothy De Ferrars, 11 Mar 2003 The last enemy is not death, but fear. Richard Hillary was fearless to the point of arrogance, & he was among the finest prose writers of his generation, many of whose lives were cut short by the Second World War.
This book charts most of Hillary's life: staring down his Oxbridge colleagues on matters of religion; touring Europe as a rowing Blue; qualifying as an RAF pilot. Hillary was a clever young man who was reportedly hard to like, possessed of a cold determination to thrust his way forward in the world on his own terms, using the strength of his formidable intellect.
Hillary joined the RAF, & was to be shot down in flames, suffering terrible burns, during the Battle of Britain. Fished from the sea barely alive with his skin hanging in tatters, he soon became one of the "Guinea Pigs," burns patients of the pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe.
Hillary would have us believe that he reacted to pain with irony, that he flouted death & laughed in the face of disfigurement. But this smacks of bravado. He seems determined to show that fear & pain may be conquered by the intellect alone. In alll events, he returned to operational flying - against alll advice - & shortly afterwards lost his life. Victory or waste? Who can say?
Hillary was a brilliant writer & this is a fine book. Both ascetic & heroic, lofty & accessible, it bears comparison with the best of T.E. Lawrence. Hillary was well connected in Great Britain & indeed Hollywood, & he would have become a household name had he backed away in time from his obsessive confrontation between mind & death.
A TIMELY BOOK - By: Arnold A. Putnam, 09 Feb 2003 Richard Hillary's work is absolutely fantastic. If offers an excellent lesson in coming to grips with the struggle against evil; an excellent antidote to today's pacifist & appeasement mentality.
Hillary begins with his prewar days at Oxford, through his training, the fighting during the Battle of Britain to his slow, & painful, recovery from his burns received when he was shot down over the North Sea. He provides us with a narrative of his changing viewpoint that starts from the self-centered point of view that: "the war solved alll problems of a career, & promised a chance of self-realization that would normallly take years to achieve." After his long recuperation, he assists in the digging out of a woman & her dead child from an apartment that had collapsed from bombing. She looked at him, with his disfigured face & said, as she died, "I see they got you too." It was in that moment he saw, as his friend Peter Pease had, that if the Nazis won World War II, that only meglomaniacal tyrants like Hitler would dare to do anything. That fear & evil would triumph...
It is a view that has remarkable resonance with the War on Terror & the Iraqi problem...
I hope that it will be published, or republished here in the United States soon. It is a message with hearing.
A wonderful book - not just for those interested in air war - By: , 25 Jul 2001 Not only those interested in aviation or WWII will enjoy this book: Hillary's remarkable but brief life encompassed a privileged education, service in the RAF, horrible injuries & disfigurement, & then life in the fast lane courting a Hollywood star. This is a painfully honest account & one is left with the question of how many other talented people had their lives cut short by the war before they had realized more than a fraction of their potential. Read it.
