Seth Meyerowitz

The Lost Airman is by the grandson of an American airman who was downed over France during WWII. It is based on private memoirs and interviews. The story is unsurprisingly thrilling given the subject. It is not a classic but well told and very interesting. There may be some fictive elements, going into the heads of characters describing how they are feeling and so on. Harmless, at worst an authors interpretation, but it opens questions if actual events have been changed for a better story - for example I could not understand why a downed American airman is taken by the French resistance into a cafe frequented by the Gestapo. The book changed my perceptions of how downed airmen were smuggled out of the country, not always hidden in attics but moving about in plain sight with fake ID papers, working in day jobs, waiting months for the right opportunity.… (altro)