Four Thousand Bowls of Rice: A Prisoner of War Comes Home (Signed)

Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1993. First Edition. Hardcover. New/New. 6x1x9. Illustrated. Signed by the author. This work tells how one prisoner of war prepared himself, mentally and physically, for his journey home after three and a half years of brutal captivity in Java, Burma and Thailand during World War II. Staff Sergeant Cecil Dickson was a member of the 2/2 Australian Pioneer Battalion, which was forced to surrender to the Japanese in March 1942. His engineering unit bore the heaviest work in constructing the Burma-Thailand railway. The author draws on Dickson's letters home to his wife, and on research and interviews with many surviving Pioneers, to paint a dramatic picture of prisoner-of-war life under the Japanese. Readers can discover what it felt like to emerge abruptly from one day's starvation to the next day's air-drops, and from being in regimented captivity to being in charge of one's own time again. Dickson's writings also provide a glimpse of one man's determination to free his mind from continued captivity by replacing bitter memories with the sights and sounds of post-war Bangkok, and with tender thoughts of reunion with loved ones. Navy cloth with gold spine lettering. Author's signature on half title page. Illustrated. xxiii, 179pp., index. Full refund if not satisfied.