Going Solo

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You'll read stories of whizzing through the air in a Tiger Moth Plane, encounters with deadly green mambas and hungry lions, and the terrible crash that led him to storytelling. We were fortunate, those of us who grew up in the 1980s. Almost every year there would be a new book by Roald Dahl which would be passed around at school and discussed with great seriousness. There were also playground arguments about his name: ‘It’s not Ronald, it’s Roald! Don’t you know anything?’ The one aspect that is most pervasive and persistently present throughout the text is the constant reminder of the link between fact and fiction and between the world of reality and the imaginative pursuits it stimulates. Dahl’s fiction for both older readers and kids is typically characterized using words like grotesque and macabre and the world of reality he conveys in this autobiographical tome is every bit as grotesque and macabre as his fiction.

Going Solo - Wikipedia

i don't know why, as a child, i was so obsessed with roald dahl's recollection of his time as a soldier flying airplanes over Africa during World War II? Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2011-09-27 17:12:09 Boxid IA151701 Boxid_2 CH131118 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City Harmondsworth, (Middlesex) Donor His flying lessons and time as a fighter pilot, in the doomed and ill-advised British effort to defend Greece. Dahl learned on the job and survived. Most of his comrades-in-arms didn't. The pitifully small British air detachment was largely destroyed. Only, before Roald could finish his time with the Shell company... the Great War broke out. And that was quite a story in itself. Roald joined the airforce and was trained as a pilot. As in, he was give 7 and a half hours of in-flight training before being declared fit for service along with fifteen other new pilots. Then, they were given fighter planes and told to get up in the air. Unsurprisingly, this happened: As a child, I'd devoured all of Dahl's books including this one, but its depth and underlying horror hadn't really registered with me as a nine-year-old.

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Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter of Norwegian descent, who rose to prominence in the 1940's with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's bestselling authors. It's getting 5 stars because my 2nd grade son LOVES, LOVES, LOVES it!!! The other night he got sent to bed with no read aloud (the little bastard lied to me about brushing his teeth, I know I'm such a hard ass) but he didn't even care!!! He just said "OK", grabbed his this book and happily trotted off to bed. All this before he turned twenty-five. The things he had to live through churned my stomach - e specially the account of how he crashed his first plane. Dahl spares no details and, as always, his stories were absolutely fascinating. And now you can listen to all of Roald Dahl's stories on audio, read by some very famous voices, including Kate Winslet, David Walliams and Steven Fry - plus there are added squelchy soundeffects from Pinewood Studios! Roald Dahl sometimes shared a tonal kinship with Ogden Nash, and he could demonstrate a verbal inventiveness nearly Seussian…[His] stories work better in audio than in print.” – The New York Times

Going solo : Dahl, Roald : Free Download, Borrow, and Going solo : Dahl, Roald : Free Download, Borrow, and

From the bestselling author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG comes an autobiographical account of his exploits as a World War II pilot! Some people do not realize that although a Hurricane had eight guns in its wings, those guns were all immobile. You did not aim the guns, you aimed the plane. The guns themselves were carefully sighted and tested beforehand on the ground so that the bullets from each gun would converge at a point about 150 yards ahead. Thus, using your reflector-sight, you aimed the plane at the target and pressed the button. To aim accurately in this way requires skilful flying, especially as you are usually in a steep turn and going very fast when the moment comes.

Round and round Athens we went, and I was so busy trying to prevent my starboard wing-tip from scraping against the plane next to me that this time I was in no mood to admire the grand view of the Parthenon or any of the other famous relics below me. Our formation was being led by Flight-Lieutenant Pat Pattle. Now Pat Pattle was a legend in the RAF. At least he was a legend around Egypt and the Western Desert and in the mountains of Greece. He was far and away the greatest fighter ace the Middle East was ever to see, with an astronomical number of victories to his credit. It was even said that he had shot down more planes than any of the famous and glamorized Battle of Britain aces, and this was probably true. I myself had never spoken to him and I am sure he hadn’t the faintest idea who I was. I wasn’t anybody. I was just a new face in a squadron whose pilots took very little notice of each other anyway. But I had observed the famous Flight-Lieutenant Pattle in the mess tent several times. He was a very small man and very soft-spoken, and he possessed the deeply wrinkled doleful face of a cat who knew that all nine of its lives had already been used up. It is a fact, and I verified it carefully later, that out of those sixteen, no less than thirteen were killed in the air within the next two years within the first 3rd of the book there was nudity on boats, a lion carrying a person, and a snake crawling into someone's house. Following on from Boy, Going Solo was another tremendously important book to me as a child. Where I could relate to his boyhood tales in some way, the next part of his life was a complete window to another world. Read then it was extraordinary and magical; read now I appreciate it on different levels entirely. The book started with Dahl's voyage to Africa in 1938, which was prompted by his desire to find adventure after finishing school. [1] He was on a boat heading towards Dar es Salaam for his new job working for Shell Oil. During this journey, he met various people [2] and described extraordinary events such as a lion carrying a woman in its mouth.

Going Solo - Penguin Books UK

A wonderful, harrowing and yet somehow light-hearted account of Dahl's time during the Second World War as a RAF pilot. Most fascinating, which one finds with the war poets, is, though it is obviously horrid and despicable, they all seem to bloody love war. Not nice when you nearly die, but jolly good fun otherwise. Camaraderie has a lot to do with it, but I think it's also just what you need to do when faced with such senseless, mindless stupidity. His account of life as a fighter pilot in the Western Desert and in Greece has the thrilling intensity and the occasional grotesqueness of his fiction Sunday Times Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-07-02 11:02:53 Boxid IA1834123 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier However, this book left me with a ton of unanswered questions. Like, what happened when he went home after the war? What did he do for work? How did he start writing, etc? I felt it was only an autobiography about a tiny bit of his life. It was probably the most tragic part of his life, but still only a little bit of it. It made me feel like there was still a lot missing or that there should have been another book after Going Solo. His first children's book was The Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore. The book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made, and published in 1943. Dahl went on to create some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach.In Going Solo, the world's favourite storyteller, Roald Dahl, tells of life as a fighter pilot in Africa.