McKenzie's boots - Softcover

Noonan, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0702220701 ISBN 13: 9780702220708

Publisher: University of Queensland Press, 1987

Synopsis

Set in Australia in 1941, this novel follows Rod, a giant of a schoolboy who enlists and becomes a legend to his platoon, not least for his outsize boots. This is a warm, honest novel whose hero explodes the heroic notions of war by questioning wartime atrocities.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Although he is only 15, tall, strapping Rod is able to talk his way into the Australian army during World War II; he joins a platoon fighting the Japanese in New Guinea. A sympathetic encounter with an enemy soldier makes him aware of their shared humanity. Some time later, Rod is killed in battle, and, as a souvenir, the Japanese take Rod's enormous boots. His outraged mates storm the camp to regain them; years later one of them realizes that the Japanese troops considered Rod a genuine hero, and that the boots were taken out of respect, not as a morbid wartime trophy. Despite effusive prose and heavy-handed symbolism, Noonan creates many scenes of graphic intensity and presents a largely glorified vision of battle. But, perhaps because he writes primarily of individual acts of daring rather than the daily horrors of infantry warfare, the focus is a boyishly old-fashioned view of fighting, oddly romantic in this post-Vietnam era. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0702220701
• ISBN 13: 9780702220708
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 238