Amazon.com: McKenzie's boots (9780702219894): Michael Noonan: Books

Unknown Binding: 238 pages
Publisher: University of Queensland Press (1987)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0702219894
ISBN-13: 978-0702219894

Book Description

Publication Date: 1987

To escape an unhappy situation at home, fourteen-year-old Rod McKenzie, six feet tall and still growing, enlists in the army during World War II claiming to be nineteen.

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } To escape an unhappy situation at home, fourteen-year-old Rod McKenzie, six feet tall and still growing, enlists in the army during World War II claiming to be nineteen.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.