Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace (Vintage) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Overlong and slyly self-important, travel writer Gimlette's third book takes the recollections of WWII veteran Putnam Flint and combines them with Gimlette's own European tour for a then-and-now travelogue that doesn't ever quite connect. Flint, an 86-year-old Bostonian who traveled from Provence to Austria with his tank destroyer battalion during the closing days of the war, is winning, inquisitive and has a writer's gift for precise language, telling Gimlette, "In combat, you hear guns, and it's like a musical score. The story unrolls from there." Unfortunately, Gimlette can't help but stretch the metaphor to the breaking point: "In Flint's case, it was a complex score, and no two recitals were ever quite the same." The two-thirds spent with Gimlette's own travels are often tedious; he has a fondness for looking for old brothels and new strip clubs, and a heavy hand with generalizations: "For the French, culture is duty, for the Americans it's pleasure." The combination of Gimlette's fatuous modern opinions and a tense historical memoir never quite gels; Flint's worthwhile stories deserve better. Illustrations.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

Gimlette has written a travelogue of a vanished place, the "great wheeled city" of more than two million American soldiers that rolled up from Marseilles in 1944 to meet the German Army. He sets out with an American veteran of the campaign to see what remains of that movable metropolis. Their progress is marked by chapters like "La Sauce Parisienne" and "Sauerkraut und Blitzen," and soup, as the title implies, is key: the "soup of wrecks" in a bombed harbor; the "vat of municipal soup" boiled up by starving Austrians from scavenged G.I. swill; the fetid fraud that is bouillabaisse. And then there’s dessert: soldiers feed on "Hershey bars and powdered lemonade," and make forays into Paris, where "sex was cheaper than chocolate." This is a book about the appetites of war and peace—for food, sex, and human comfort—unbridled, sordid, and, somehow, in their ability to lead a civilization back to itself, redeeming.
Copyright © 2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307277917
• ISBN-13: 978-0307277916
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #611,396 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tracks in the mud through the mists of time, April 10, 2008

By	Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace (Hardcover)

Fans of John Gimlette will be delighted with his most recent book, Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace. Gimlette is a graceful writer who writes realistic travel books based on the details of his own experiences. In At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay, he found himself in Paraguay during the Falklands War; as a Brit in Argentina he decided to cross the border and the result was a study of a country few readers know much about. He inherited a large number of materials from his grandfather who had been a medical missionary in Canada; the result of tracing his grandfather's steps was Theatre of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador.

In Panther Soup -- the title is taken from the name of the muddy roads created by trucks and tanks during World War II -- Gimlette follows the path of US veteran Putnam Flint who was part of the American invasion of Europe in 1944 and 1945. Gimlette met Flint during a dinner and after considerable effort was able to convince Flint to return to Europe for the first time since his return to Boston from the war 60 years earlier.

The two journey with Putnam's grandson Jeff from Marseilles to Austria following the path of Flint's 824th Panther Tank Busters unit. The book reconstructs Flint's experiences and and records Flint's modern reactions:

"Sergeant Parham was the only one who'd ever known enemy fire (Panama '38), but it was not an experience he could humanely explain. `I shot one right though his left ear,' he'd say, `and it came out of his right.' The only other professional was Major Clint Smith, the battalion commander. He was a tall fleshless man from somewhere south-west, all chickenshit and razor-sharp dress trousers. Everyone else felt much like Flint, overawed and out of place. The 824th were always an odd mix. Amongst almost 800 uprooted souls there were Cubans, Baptists, truckers, dockers, hucksters, accountants, cops, cheats, hunters, conscientious objectors (serving as medics), asthmatics, several athletes, countless adulterers, a couple known as `The Rover Boys' and a Chinaman called Jung Chin. It was like a village in the ether, a community only in concept."

As in his earlier books, Gilmette records his own reactions to the sights they encounter:

"Then I'm at the top, alone on an empty battlefield. It's like a landscape inside out, a great belly of eviscerated earth and rock. All around is the wreckage of an Armageddon, a vast fungal fortress system of shattered domes and concrete mushrooms, pillboxes, foxholes, giant gun emplacements, crumbling redans, rangefinders, embrasures and trenches ten feet deep. I find tiny, cement cells in the earth, like weird earth-borne fruits that have ripened and burst and turned to stone. Nothing has been spared the cataclysm. It's now a world of components and pieces; lumps of roadblock, bedsprings, a glittering carpet of glass, and fuel cans scattered like chaff. Obstinate chimneys nose their way up through the rubble and, in the cement, I see a date scratched with a stick: 1944."

One of the most poignant moments occurs in Alsace. Flint remembers that he was ordered to shell a church tower in a town three miles away which the Germans were using as an observation post. Flint and Gilmette find the tank's location, then visit the town which was shelled and where the damage has now been repaired. They spend some emotional moments discussing the shelling with residents who remember the day their church was destroyed.

This book is a remarkable achievement, beautifully written, deeply human, and a fascinating journey through the past and the present.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The War that had to be Fought, June 9, 2008

By	Ralph Daniels (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace (Hardcover)

World War II was the war that had to be fought. While Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq always had their doubters, the consensus of Americans and particularly of those who fought and sometimes died in the horrific battles of World War II, was that opposing the Nazis and the Japanese was the right thing to do.

Putnam Flint was a platoon commander in the 824th Tank Destroyer Battalion, better known as "The Panthers", which first landed in Marseilles in mid-1944, was bloodied in the hard fought battles in the Vosges region of Alsace and Lorraine, crossed the Rhine into Germany and then near the end of the war, dashed into the Austrian Tyrol helping to capture the future Olympic Winter Games site of Innsbruck.

At age 86, Putnam Flint, who had never revisited the countries he had known while under fire as a soldier, was coaxed into returning by the renowned travel writer and author, John Gimlette, a British barrister who had the good fortune to meet Putnam at a dinner in London. As Putnam and John accompanied by Putnam's grandson, Jeff, traversed the invasion route of the US Seventh Army, Putnam shares his thoughts of what it was like to be a combat soldier, his hopes and fears, but mostly about the camaraderie of his men and the sense of duty of a job that had to be done. He recreates the everyday drudgery of army life as he and his fellow combatants slogged through the mud, endured biting cold and lived with the terrible smell of death.

I have read hundreds, if not thousands of books about war, the Holocaust and other horrific events, and seen hundreds of films depicting the same. Yet, no matter how many books I read, nor movies I see, no matter how realistic they seem, I think it is the smell of a battlefield or of a destroyed town, village or concentration camp, its blood, feces and bloated corpses of both men and beasts that one cannot really know unless you were there. However, this book does its best to make us imagine what hopefully most us have never (myself happily included), nor wish to ever experience for ourselves.

John Gimlette supplements Putnam's recollections with quotes from his battalion's combat records along with interviews and conversations of the local French, German and Austrian inhabitants, including former German soldiers whom they encounter along the way, to inform us of what happened in 1944-45 and how they remember that time in the present day.

Along the way, much colorful local history is added into the mix by John and while not all of it would appear to bear on the main theme, the anecdotes are wonderful nuggets of information and nearly all of them are greatly entertaining, whether they concern organized crime in Marseilles or the history of Shakespeare and Company bookstore and literary salon in Paris. After all, while World War II is the main focus, this is also a travel book and John's observations on the history, as well as present day life in these places make them come alive and make me want to visit many of them in person.

Everyday, thousands of World War II veterans are passing away before our eyes and it will unfortunately not be too many more years before the last of them are gone. Putnam Flint, with the help of John Gimlette, has done us all a great service by sharing with us the story of his wartime experiences, something that until he returned to Europe with John, he had never talked about, not even to his family.

There is something in "Panther Soup" (I love the title which signifies the mud that was a constant while in the field) for everyone but mostly it is the story of a man, Putnam Flint, who perhaps typifies how everyday men became heroes doing a job not because they wanted to be there but because it had to be done and they understood that it was their duty to perform it.

4.0 out of 5 stars Unique Book and Story, August 27, 2009

By	Jeff Swystun - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A journey that combines travelogue, history, and cultural study. It follows the return of war-veteran Putnam Flint whose WW2 experience involves a less known campaign in Europe. It takes the reader on the path he followed after landing in Marseilles in October, 1994 through to Austria and the close of the war but in present day. The author accompanied Flint and his grandson, Jeff documenting the journey and adding rich history, geography, and cultural analysis.

It is like 5 books in 1 and all of them interesting alone and in the aggregate. It has the potential to spawn an entirely new genre - imagine a Vietnam veteran's personal odyssey. What made the book so special is the time that has passed for context and perspective, the honesty and subtle reflections of Flint, the innocence and wonder of the grandson, and the incredible insights and writing of Gimlette.