Achtung Schweinehund!: A Boy's Own Story of Imaginary Combat

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Little, Brown, Jan 24, 2008 - Biography & Autobiography - 256 pages

This is a book about men and war. Not real conflict but war as it has filtered down to generations of boys and men through toys, comics, games and movies. Harry Pearson belongs to the great battalion of British men who grew up playing with toy soldiers - refighting World War II - and then stopped growing up. Inspired by the photos of the gallant pilot uncles that decorated the wall above his father's model-making table, by Sergeant Hurricane, Action Man and Escape from Colditz, dressed in Clarks' commando shoes and with the Airfix Army in support, he battled in the fields and on the beaches, in his head and on the sitting-room floor and across his bedroom ceiling. And thirty years later he still is.

ACHTUNG SCHWEINEHUND! is a celebration of those glory days, a boy's own story of the urge to play, to conquer - and to adopt very bad German accents, shouting 'Donner und Blitzen' at every opportunity. This is a tale of obsession, glue and plastic kits. It is the story of one boy's imaginary war and where it led him.

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Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
9
Section 3
21
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

Harry Pearson was born and brought up on the edge of Teesside. He is the author of eight works of non-fiction. The Far Corner - A Mazy Dribble through North-East Football, was runner-up for the William Hill Prize and has been named as one of the Fifty Greatest Sports Books of All Time by both the Observer and The Times. He wrote a weekly sports column in the Guardian from 1996 to 2012, and won the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize for his book about Northern club cricket, Slipless in Settle. He lives in Northumberland.

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