Professor Robin Gerster, who teaches at Monash University and has published extensively on Australian war literature, has written a review of “Ray Parkin’s Odyssey” for The Age newspaper. “His POW writings have a Homeric quality, not in the sense of celebrating battlefield virtuosity, but in their poetic largeness of spirit, in their refusal to peddle shibboleths or to buckle to self-pity, and in a pervasive if discriminating generosity that recognises the maimed humanity of the Japanese captor, men like the prisoners themselves entrapped by the all-in viciousness of war. By the time he died, at the age of 94 in
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