Panther Soup

A European Journey in War and Peace

By: John Gimlette

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Paperback | 15 January 2009 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
432 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.0 x 13.5 x 3.2

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A chance encounter with an American WWII veteran leads John Gimlette on an astonishing journey through France, Germany and Austria.

In a journey that takes the author through the last months of the war, through some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, and through cities that have risen from cinders, Panther Soup is a tale as rich, bleak and absurd as war itself.

There's a colourful cast of survivors showing the way. But it's the American veteran, Putnam Flint, who guides the author through the emotions of that time. Now 86, he had been one of nearly three million Americans moving across the face of the continent.

It had been a journey of unimaginable scale and complexity, an armoured migration, a wheeled city rolling through Europe. For most of his life, Flint has lived with the memories of a tank-mangled sludge (the "Panther Soup") and finds himself once again speeding up the Rhone Valley, re-living the camps, visiting the villages he'd shelled, and meeting the children of the battlefield, now elderly themselves. They find the field where Flint mowed down the flak-crew, and the Austrian village where he dueled with a Nazi fanatic.

Industry Reviews

A very special piece of travel writing. To journey past familiar European landmarks with someone who knew them in the post-war chaos of the 1940s is both moving and illuminating

-- Tim Butcher, author of Blood River
Gimlette has a gift for travel writing with details of the most intimate kind, the small change and ammunition of a soldier's life... A subtle book, with telling testimony from the survivors of what it was actually like to fight a war with few rules -- Hugh Thomson * Independent *
An important book, reminding us of the links between old and new world, ideals and ideologies, war and peace in our phoenix-like continent. It is at once raw and erudite, deeply moving and strangely leisurely. It's also rich in black humour and insight -- Rory MacLean * Guardian *
An original travel book, written in vigorous prose and exhaustively researched... it has at its heart a profound understanding of the "soup" - the chaos and madness - of war * Daily Telegraph *
As a born traveller and writer, he takes an epicurean pleasure in place and language -- Tom Fort * Sunday Telegraph *

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