The entry begins:Ten Fighter Boys. Foreward by Jimmy Corbin: First published by Collins in 1942, reissued by Collins 2008About An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War, from the publisher:
There are sentences from books indelibly etched in my mind from boyhood. “Call me Ishmael,” “I am born.” There is another. I’ll tell you about it later. My father served in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve during WWII. When I was a boy he used my bedroom as his library. Two of my favourite books were Spitfire Pilot by David Crook, and Ten Fighter Boys. Reading them I began to appreciate the immense bravery of the young men who fought in the Battle of Britain in the sumer and autumn of 1940. My interest in military history sprang from those works. Ten Fighter Boys was an unedited collection of the stories of ten Spitfire pilots on 66 Squadron stationed at Biggin Hill.
To my intense delight while looking for something to read on a recent flight to England and Ireland in part to visit a naval hospital which...[read on]
Long before Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly became a fixture in the colourful Irish village of Ballybucklebo, he was a young M.B. with plans to marry midwife Dierdre Mawhinney. Those plans were complicated by the outbreak of World War II and the call of duty. Assigned to the HMS Warspite, a formidable 30,000-ton battleship, Surgeon Lieutenant O’Reilly soon found himself face-to-face with theLearn more about the book and author at Patrick Taylor's website.hardships of war, tending to the dreadnought’s crew of 1,200 as well as to the many casualties brought aboard.
Life in Ballybuckebo is a far cry from the strife of war, but over two decades later O’Reilly and his younger colleagues still have plenty of challenges: an outbreak of German measles, the odd tropical disease, a hard-fought pie-baking contest, and a local man whose mule-headed adherence to tradition is standing in the way of his son’s future. Now older and wiser, O’Reilly has prescriptions for whatever ails…until a secret from the past threatens to unravel his own peace of mind.
Shifting deftly between two very different eras, Patrick Taylor’s latest Irish Country novel reveals more about O’Reilly’s tumultuous past, even as Ballybucklebo faces the future in its own singular fashion.
My Book, The Movie: An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War.
The Page 69 Test: An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War.
Writers Read: Patrick Taylor.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
