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To Serve Them All My Days
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To Serve Them All My Days - Part 9 Re-Run and the book as a whole - July 2019
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Hana, Hana is In Absentia
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Jul 10, 2019 08:31AM
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I just finished this the other day and really loved it. I could have continued reading about Pow-Wow and the boys for several hundred more pages. As you say, there is the feeling of Bamfylde coming full circle, but also of history being a long and complicated series of threads that are never fully untangled, and which do not have a clear beginning, end, or moral lesson.
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I do think there is a moral lesson--one that speaks of the values of friendship, courage and loyalty. The long-running feud between Carter and Powlett-Jones and the carefully articulated views of Headmaster Algy also suggest a clear sense of tradition and an educational view that places priority on developing character rather than passing tests and advancing in ones career.
I hope you'll chime in on the read with your views as we go through each section!
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Perhaps part of the joy of the Plenitude chapters is that Davy manages to fuse both tradition and change.
Yes, I completely agree that the book has a moral lesson. I meant that I had the feeling from the book that history itself does not have a particular moral lesson -- that "good" and "bad" aren't so easily defined and that they continue to clash over and over again.
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