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middleone95's review
4.0
Keggie Carew executes the incredibly daunting task of documenting her Dad’s extraordinary life in the context of her own fraught family life. She does a great job, with particular credit due to her amazing work collecting the various photos, letters and telegraphs through the years. Her telling of her Dad’s struggles after he leaves the army is where the real beauty in her writing is, the pain of each family member is written with truth and honesty but respect. I think she does some slight injustices to most of the women in her life by not really digging in to where the men disappear to in the darkest times but this truly is a fantastic story of a truly unique family and their problems.
greybeard49's review against another edition
3.0
The premise of the book was admirable and potentially really interesting - an account, written by his daughter, of the exploits of a truly remarkable man during WWII and of his unfortunate deterioration in later life due to dementia. And initially I enjoyed what I was reading. However after a time I found that the way the story was told started to overwhelm me. The style started to grate, the scenarios, although different in time and place, were told in a repetitive and overly 'gushy' fashion. Descriptions of mundane places and events were written about in an almost super detailed fairytale fashion.
The actions of the author's father are well documented and his bravery truly admirable.
My criticism lies with the writing of the account - not the underlying history.
The actions of the author's father are well documented and his bravery truly admirable.
My criticism lies with the writing of the account - not the underlying history.
nickeal1's review
4.0
What an incredible life the author's father led in his youth. I found the description of his exploits as a Jedburgh in France and Burma enthralling and educational. His life with Dementia was a different adventure and readers were privy to his own frustrations with his loss of faculties by way of the photo of notes he wrote. The author's hatred of her stepmother i found jarring and wondered why it became such a feature of the book but it was obviously something she felt she had to release
taliaissmart's review against another edition
5.0
A well-told, humorous and informative journey by the author into the past of her aging father, who is swiftly losing his memory. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the war bits, feeling like I was learning a good deal about undercover operations in France and Burma during WWII. Carew writes affectionately but matter-of-factly about her father, showing him in a true light rather than a necessarily flattering one. The most pressing complaint I have regarding Dadland is about the occasional non sequiturs and time jumps, which caused some confusion on my part. This book could definitely have benefitted from a bit of reorganizing. Overall, though, I found this book highly engaging.
Thank you to the publisher for providing a free review copy via Edelweiss.
Thank you to the publisher for providing a free review copy via Edelweiss.
irena_smith's review
5.0
One of the best things I've read in a long, long time. Reminiscent in parts of "H Is for Hawk" for its intense, plangent sadness, but very much its own animal—a mesmerizing hybrid, part war history, part memoir, suffused by the incredible energy and life force of Tom Carew, the author's father, who fought with a special forces unit with the Maquis behind enemy lines at the Franco-Swiss border and then almost immediately parachuted into the jungles of Burma to fight with guerrilla forces against the Japanese. Except that now, in his 80s, Tom Carew is descending into dementia, and it is up to Keggie, his daughter, to resurrect his earlier life from letters, photos, and archived documents, and to wrestle with her own sense of loss as the father she knew slips away. Wrenching, beautiful, smart, and mordantly, archly funny. An amazing read.
kristianamr's review
4.0
A book which bounced between three and four stars. Carew biographical look at her father’s life was incredibly interesting and moving, and no mean feat but as others have written here, Carew’s own neediness and storyline (such as her contempt for her Stepmother) often impeded the purpose of the work to capture her father’s life and memory.
stephh's review
2.0
This started off really strong, but as the book went on I found it dragged. The action in the Burma section was very slow moving, and I found that I couldn't empathise for any of the characters. The first 100 pages were intriguing, and I wish that the author had maintained that level of narrative intensity, rather than making this unnecessarily lengthy.
halfmanhalfbook's review against another edition
3.0
Tom Carew was quite an amazing guy; at the age of 24 he parachuted into Nazi-occupied France as part of a secret operation with the codename Jedburgh. As secret agents went, he was bold and talented and unbelievable brave and caused lots of disruption; he even managed to escape from the Germans after having been captured. Having completed a successful mission he next destination was Burma, a place that would forge his reputation, making him somewhat of a legend as ‘Lawrence of Burma’ or the ‘Mad Irishman’. His exploits culminated in the award of a Distinguished Service Order (DSO), the youngest officer to ever obtain this.
To Keggie though he was just her dad. She was proud of his record during the war, even though she didn’t always understand what he had done, nor the significance of his actions. He had a liberal view of school, taking her out to take part in activities and providing the school with dubious reasons why. Her parents then split, and with the arrival of a step-mother on the scene, it meant that the strong bond she once had with her father, had gone. This gap lasted far too long, but in 2003 her step mother passed away and they pretty much picked up where they left off. She accompanied him to a Jedburgh reunion to meet up with lots of other veterans, their attitude to life and refusal to defer to authority was quite refreshing and it prompted Keggie to start to begin to sift through the files in his loft to learn more about his wartime antics. What suddenly made this uncovering of her father’s history more urgent was that Tom had suffered a series of small strokes and was starting to show signs of the long decline into dementia. And as Tom’s memories ebbed away, Keggie began to recover them through the documents.
It is a complex story that Keggie tells about her father and family. She weaves together the plight of her father as he forgets who his children are with the drama and excitement of the behind lines war activities. He was quite an amazing man and his military achievements gained him a DSO, but after the war, he found it hard to settle into regular life as a civilian. Even in his care home, he managed to cause a certain amount of chaos. Keggie’s writing is immersive and at times dense, the section about his military work in Burma was almost as hard to get through as hacking your way through a jungle there, but she writes with a warmth and generosity about her father, a man who was a genuine character and hero.
To Keggie though he was just her dad. She was proud of his record during the war, even though she didn’t always understand what he had done, nor the significance of his actions. He had a liberal view of school, taking her out to take part in activities and providing the school with dubious reasons why. Her parents then split, and with the arrival of a step-mother on the scene, it meant that the strong bond she once had with her father, had gone. This gap lasted far too long, but in 2003 her step mother passed away and they pretty much picked up where they left off. She accompanied him to a Jedburgh reunion to meet up with lots of other veterans, their attitude to life and refusal to defer to authority was quite refreshing and it prompted Keggie to start to begin to sift through the files in his loft to learn more about his wartime antics. What suddenly made this uncovering of her father’s history more urgent was that Tom had suffered a series of small strokes and was starting to show signs of the long decline into dementia. And as Tom’s memories ebbed away, Keggie began to recover them through the documents.
It is a complex story that Keggie tells about her father and family. She weaves together the plight of her father as he forgets who his children are with the drama and excitement of the behind lines war activities. He was quite an amazing man and his military achievements gained him a DSO, but after the war, he found it hard to settle into regular life as a civilian. Even in his care home, he managed to cause a certain amount of chaos. Keggie’s writing is immersive and at times dense, the section about his military work in Burma was almost as hard to get through as hacking your way through a jungle there, but she writes with a warmth and generosity about her father, a man who was a genuine character and hero.