Search results for ""Author Jack Swaab""
Fonthill Media Ltd Always a Little Further: Reflections from Late in the Day
For the past three years, since he finished writing his children's book 'The Nine Lives Of Bella Simkins', Jack Swaab has carried round a battered leather notebook. In it, he has recorded the thoughts, memories, reflections and insights that the world around him bring to this remarkable author. It is a broad canvas that attracts his urbane and witty mind's eye-covering everything from footballers to birdsong, churchyards to ancient cricketers, boy scouts to Brexit. Some of what he writes is funny, other parts are tinged with melancholy. At times, banality, brutality or injustice stir him to the edge of anger. Everything he writes, though, comes with the warmth, wisdom and generosity of spirit that the past 98 years have bestowed on him. It is a very different world in which he now lives, and seeing that world through the vivid lens of so many years and so rich a life brings it to life for us too in unexpected and rewarding ways.
£12.99
The History Press Ltd Field of Fire: Diary of a Gunner Officer
Jack Swaab joined the veteran 51st (Highland) Infantry Division on 3 January 1943. He kept a series of diaries over the following two and a half years, recording the combination of boredom and fear that characterises active service. In mid-March 1943 he saw battle for the first time as Montgomery attacked the Mareth Line. In July that year Swaab took part in the Allied landings on Sicily, writing of the scorching humidity of the Sicilian summer. In May 1944 he records the restless time as his regiment prepared for the invasion of Normandy. In September 1944 Swaab's role changed dramatically, as he moved from commanding a troop to being a forward observation officer. His new position meant that he was working closely with the infantry in the front line. Swaab's first five months as a forward observation officer came to an abrupt end on 13 February, when he was wounded in the leg by shellfire. He was again selected for FOO duty during Operation 'Varsity', the Rhine crossing, in March 1945, and received the Military Cross.
£15.99
