Reviews and praise for “Ray Parkin’s Odyssey”.
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 2005, Parkin was in every way the most enduring of his generation of Australian World War II writers.
For a man who left school at 15 and who endured such terrible wartime experiences, Parkin’s is a remarkable, and remarkably uplifting, story.
All in all, Pattie Wright’s “Ray Parkin’s Odyssey” is a fascinating and superbly illustrated book…
For a maritime nation such as Australia, truly girt by sea, the dearth of knowledge of our naval history and its contribution to nation-building, in particular in the human quotient, is disappointing. Some call it ”sea-blindness” and it is something we must all work to correct.
Pattie Wright with her work on Ray Parkin’s Odyssey has helped us enormously in this quest. We need more of it.