An engaging, funny, and tender memoir from a man of ninety years: of growing up poor in a Brooklyn and Ireland that now exist only in memory, and of serving in the China/Burma/India theater
during World War II as a member of an elite U.S. Navy commando unit
John Freely’s voice is still astonishingly youthful, full of wonder, humor, and gratitude, as he remembers his fully lived life: born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants, taken to Ireland by his
mother when he was five (the Depression had hit hard), his young childhood spent on his grandfather’s farm in western Ireland, impoverished by the times, but rich in beauty and intriguing
people, opening in him a lifelong desire to see the world and its inhabitants; returning to Brooklyn when he was seven, the antics of a coming-of-age boy played out on streets filled with
character and characters; taking whatever jobs he could when times got tough but always shaking off his losses and moving on, hungry to see and experience what was next; joining the U.S. Navy
at seventeen to ＂see the world,＂ and doing just that: even in wartime, while bringing supplies and ammunition over the Burma Road to Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese guerrilla forces, serving
alongside them during the last weeks of World War II in the Tibetan borderlands of China, a Shangri-la that war had turned into hell on earth.
