Going Solo (Roald Dahl's Autobiography, #2) in Around the World in 80 Books

Sep 16, 2019 Elizabeth rated it it was amazing

Shelves: africa, england, greece

I also read this book as as child, but for some reason I forgot to add it until just now when I re-read it. It was as entertaining as ever!

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Sep 09, 2010 Kay rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: world_war_ii, biogr-memoir, nonfiction, africa

Roald Dahl was a noted raconteur, which is abundantly clear in this wartime memoir, which takes off where his childhood memoir, Boy, left off. Written for young adults, the book nevertheless has considerable appeal for adults, particularly in his narration of his exploits as an Shell employee in British East Africa (Kenya) and then as an RAF pilot after World War II broke out.

There are many thrilling episodes -- everything from man-eating lions and encounters with deadly mamba snakes in the Bri Roald Dahl was a noted raconteur, which is abundantly clear in this wartime memoir, which takes off where his childhood memoir, Boy, left off. Written for young adults, the book nevertheless has considerable appeal for adults, particularly in his narration of his exploits as an Shell employee in British East Africa (Kenya) and then as an RAF pilot after World War II broke out.

There are many thrilling episodes -- everything from man-eating lions and encounters with deadly mamba snakes in the British East African chapters, to his training as an RAF pilot and subsequent dogfights against a far numerous enemy over the skies of Greece. Sprinkled throughout the text are photos that Dahl, a keen amateur photographer, took, as well as extracts from his letters to his mother, who kept every one of them.

Dahl recounts his experiences in a direct, commonsense way, advancing the story in snatches of remembered conversations. There is, in short, a good deal of the novelist at work on these memoirs. In fact, I had some slight misgivings about just how accurate his descriptions and remembered conversations were, for since reading this book I've started reading another book about rather than by Dahl, which concerns his work as an operative in Washington, D.C. during the war after he was pastured out by the RAF due to injuries he'd sustained as a pilot. He was, to make a long story short, not below bending the truth when it suited him.

There's an undeniably jaunty tone to Dahl's writing, not to mention an unspoken (almost taken for granted) sense of British fortitude and self-restraint. Although he does permit himself the liberty of being critical of the air command's more egregious blunders, there's an unmistakable stoicism in his description of harrowing events, such as crashing in the desert in Libya and narrowly surviving by crawling away from the wreckage of the burning plane before passing out. These vivid descriptions are thrilling stuff. Roald Dahl's is one of the more striking wartime memoirs I've read.

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Jun 03, 2012 Dana Arbelaez rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: five-stars

Have I mentioned before that I LOVE Roald Dahl?!?! Set mostly in East Africa, in the countries of present-day Tanzania and Egypt, Dahl makes the RAF from WWII sound glamorous and thrilling, as opposed to life-threatening (which it really was). I wish he'd written later memoirs; I may try to find a biography on Dahl that was written down by someone else...this book ended at a moment when I really, really want to know what happened to him next. ...more

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