I remember reading it, and about it, when it came out and running into several articles drawn from regimental histories "which cannot be reconciled with Mr. Mowat's account." (Which is not necessarily to say And No Birds Sang involves deliberate untruths; people don't often remember what actually happened during combat.) Mowat himself said he had waited until after his father died to publish it. There's some parental expectations involved as well as the presented naïveté.
We don't have (so far as I know) a really good critical biography of Farley Mowat, nor anyone who has gone through and done the monumental job of fact checking necessary to talk about the mythologizing Mowat certainly did a lot of even in ostensibly factual books. And there are very few primary sources.
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Date: 2017-08-06 03:09 am (UTC)I remember reading it, and about it, when it came out and running into several articles drawn from regimental histories "which cannot be reconciled with Mr. Mowat's account." (Which is not necessarily to say And No Birds Sang involves deliberate untruths; people don't often remember what actually happened during combat.) Mowat himself said he had waited until after his father died to publish it. There's some parental expectations involved as well as the presented naïveté.
We don't have (so far as I know) a really good critical biography of Farley Mowat, nor anyone who has gone through and done the monumental job of fact checking necessary to talk about the mythologizing Mowat certainly did a lot of even in ostensibly factual books. And there are very few primary sources.