AIRMEN AND AIRWOMEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 239, 21 January 1944, Page 14

AIRMEN AND AIRWOMEN

FLIGHTS AND ‘FANCIES. By A. R. Grimward. Drawings by Oriwa T. Haddon. Hutcheson, Bowman and Johnson, Ltd., Wellington. HIS book is what it pretends to bea collection of stories, meditations, and sketches directly or indirectly associated with the Air Force. Many people will buy it to send overseas, and the great majority of those who receive it will be delighted with it. Other copies will find their way into the hands of Air Force personnel at homewomen as well as men-and again not many will want their money back. But it was a little bold to describe it on the dust cover as "a book in the first flight." It is somewhere about the twenty-first flight as war literature, and the hundred and twenty-first in pure literature; but it was worth writing and publishing for the purpose for which it has been produced. Flight-Lieutenant Grimward, the author of the letterpress, has considerable technical skill, and that pleasant combination of sentimentality and seriousness that the publishers no doubt had in mind when they claimed for all the tales "a strong tang of the Service." The artist responsible for the drawings-which, by the way, are not illustrations, but a more or less independent feature-has skill too, and talent as well as skill, but he has not been able to make up his mind whether he is a Maori or a Pakeha. As a Pakeha he places himself in competition with men who make him look a little foolish, but the Maori field he has to himself, and it is a pity he was not content to exploit that more thoroughly. It is, after all, a most unusual fact that a book of this kind should carry drawings by a Maori, but Pakeha-Maori is (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) neither flesh nor fowl. The setting, printing, and binding of the book are all admirable.