This page is part of the homeplace advertisement-free web portal. (It is pretty much politics-free too, except for 3 sections which are obviously not.)

In the larger context of memoirs, news accuracy, and truth versus truthiness,

you may want at some time to visit http://chasegalleryconnect.org/FNC_C/Data/Brain-Neural/Truthiness/ .





Forgotten Soldier (described on the cover as a "WWII MEMOIR" by Guy Sager) was recommended to me by a friend I trust.

I found it a compelling read.

The first sentence is
"July 18, 1942."  Its no-nonsense, definitive, no-fluff nature confirmed my expectation that this memoir would be factual. It would give me an example of just how it really was, at least for one person, on the eastern front. The weather, for example, was apparently a constant adversity.  At the top of page 37 Sager notes that it was "twenty four degrees below zero".  On the same page he notes that on another horrifying day of wind the temp "fell to thirty-five degrees below zero".   Later (on page 46) he notes that on a certain clear night the temp "fell to twenty-two degrees below zero".

At some point, I began to be really distracted from the story, compelling though it is, and to wonder about how, under those awful circumstances, he was able to record/note these details.

That is, my mental
CRAP DETECTOR went off. 

I had bought several copies of " The Education of Little Tree" intending to give them to grandchildren only to discover that, while the book is
still in print, it is a fraud.
So perhaps I was perhaps quicker to be suspicious of
Forgotten Soldier than most.

So I got onto the web and found --- an enormous controversy about this book.


THE CONTROVERSY IN BRIEF

Click:  "Forgotten Soldier"  by "Guy Sager"



THE CONTROVERSY -

MORE, AND MORE CONFUSING

Click here for more.

THE BOTTOM LINE

For me, Frederick N. Chase,  the bottom line is something like this.