Passport to Manhood - Adventures of a WWII Front Line Ambulance Driver with the British and the French Foreign Legion

St Louis, Missouri: Joseph Desloge Jr., 1995. First Edition . Trade Paperback. Very Good/Very Good. 6 1/4" x 9 1/4. 149 Pages. A Two-line author's gift inscription to the original owner on the front endpaper. No other marks or stamps or defects noted to this otherwise as new book. Desloge Finally got around to recounting his life. This book follows that great literary tradition of writing a book whether people want to read it or not. No one asked him for it. His children have heard it all before, and it certainly won't' fly off the shelves of the bodice-ripper section in your local Dons Bookstore. No name dropping of the rich-and-famous here. Not one kiss-and-tell story. Desloge has a singular perspective on this country's turning points, along with an ironic, often self-mocking point-of-view so we're glad to hear what he's got to say about The Great Depression, seen through the eyes of a St. Louis rich kid, World War II as a 16-year- old who experienced it while loading the dead and wounded out of North African and Italian foxholes into American Field Service ambulances; and Latin American backwater poverty, or in the book's front cover St. George's shield (upper right) and the Kangaroo Rat (lower left) were both insignia's of the British Eighth Army. "Desert Rats" was their nickname. As an ambulance driver he saw his share of combat, and a lot of its aftermath. If it was Egypt where Desloge first gained empathy for Third Worlders he seems almost to have had more kinship with the Arab camp followers than his British Tommy messmates. He has carried it forward in his philanthropy in the field of family planning. This he hopes, will be his legacy; and it certainly seems to have brought his life around full circle, back to the days of the Depression, when dire poverty and the extremes of rich and poor shook this country and much of world to its knees.