Allan Massie

Burmese Days

One Fourteenth of an Elephant: A Memoir of Life and Death on the Burma-Thailand Railway

By

Doubleday 522pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

This is a horrifying and extraordinary book. Nobody will read it for pleasure. It is a record of man’s inhumanity to man, an appalling story of Japanese brutality during the Second World War; but – and one can only be grateful for this – it is also testimony to the resilience of the human spirit, to courage and endurance, and to the strength of comradeship. Otherwise it would be utterly intolerable.

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