Mailbox Monday, created by Marcia at To Be Continued, formerly The Printed Page, has a permanent home at its own blog. To check out what everyone has received over the last week, visit the blog and check out the links. Leave yours too.
Also, each week, Leslie, Martha, and I will share the Books that Caught Our Eye from everyone’s weekly links.
Here’s what we received:
Sketches of a Black Cat – Expanded Edition: Story of a night flying WWII pilot and artist by Ron Miner, which I edited.
This beautiful, new B&W second edition is now one hundred pages longer, filled with additional fresh stories, artwork, photos, and adventures.
Howard Miner never expected to contract the first documented case of the mumps in Guadalcanal history.
As a Navy Black Cat, he took his share of chances during the ten-hour, night long flights in darkened PBYs painted entirely black, searching the seas for enemy ships and downed fliers ~ the original stealth aircrafts. But wartime was unpredictable, and whether landing on an exotic tropical isle where the women he saw from the air turned out to be topless, or dropping wing tanks containing a strange new substance called “Napalm,” this was clearly a very different world than he had known as a college student in Indiana.
His is a tale of seven buddies, all pilots who flew at night, slept and got into mischief by day, then repeated. Their seaplane odyssey stretched from the Solomon Islands to the northern tip of the Philippines and included a full range of missions, from search, attack, and bombing runs, to daring sea rescues. Howard’s journey through training and tours of duty is skillfully captured in his art and narratives, framing a wartime drama with a personal coming of age story. The descriptive verse from the artist’s viewpoint gives us a creatively told and intriguing portrayal of WWII’s Pacific Theater.
What did you receive?