Introduction by the Blog Author
One of the youngest and last living World War II Royal Air Force fighter pilots, William Stevenson, is still active, writing his autobiography at age 87 a year ago. It is full of insights by this pilot turned post-war journalist about the mid-twentieth century and its prolonged Cold War. It’s a book that will seem too curt and brief for those who are not students of espionage and intelligence, but for those who are intense long-time students of the conflict, it is a goldmine of insights, providing ‘missing pieces’ to many an enigma.
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One of the youngest and last living World War II Royal Air Force fighter pilots, William Stevenson, is still active, writing his autobiography at age 87 a year ago. It is full of insights by this pilot turned post-war journalist about the mid-twentieth century and its prolonged Cold War. It’s a book that will seem too curt and brief for those who are not students of espionage and intelligence, but for those who are intense long-time students of the conflict, it is a goldmine of insights, providing ‘missing pieces’ to many an enigma.
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William Stevenson
(born 1925) is a British-born Canadian author and journalist. His 1976 book A Man Called Intrepid was about William Stephenson (no relation) and was a best-seller (see the Stephenson article for more). It was made into a 1979 mini-series starring David Niven and Stevenson followed it up with a 1983 book titled Intrepid's Last Case. He published his autobiography in 2012.
Stevenson set a record with another 1976 book, 90 Minutes at Entebbe. The book was about a raid where Israeli commandos secretly landed at night at an Ugandan airport and succeeded in rescuing the passengers of an airliner hi-jacked by Palestinian militants, while incurring very few casualties. The remarkable record in that pre-internet age is that Stevenson's "instant book" was written, edited, printed and available for sale within weeks of the event it described.
Bibliography [not complete]
- The Yellow Wind , 1959, Houghton Mifflin Co., Library of Congress No. 59-11830. Reportage on the People's Republic of China between 1954-1957.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stevenson_(Canadian_writer)
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A Review of Past and Present by William Stevenson
posted on Amazon.com
[5 Stars out of 5]
A World War II Royal Navy fighter pilot turned journalist recalls a long, full life becoming a man of the worldBy Kirkus Review on December 19, 2012
Born to a French mother and a father involved in secretive "special operations" during the war years, Stevenson (A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative of the Hero Whose Spy Network and Secret Diplomacy Changed the Course of History, 2009, etc.) grew up in East London dreaming about faraway places. At age 16, during the London Blitz, he volunteered at the British Navy office and gradually made his way through stages of assessment as a pilot; he recounts his adventures and poignant loss of buddies in short, punchy chapters. "Help me justify being alive," he swore to the memory of lost comrades, and he decided to devote his life to the romantic idealism of his boyhood. In peacetime London, he got a job with Mercury News under Ian Fleming
, who first informed him of an infamous man who shared his name, but with a different spelling: William Stephenson, who was well-known in British spy circles, and whom the author would later come to write about in A Man Called Intrepid. Stevenson relocated to Canada to work for the Toronto Star under the leadership of the enigmatic Harold Comfort Hindmarsh, or HCH, from whom he solicited approval for stories by submitting brief notes in his pigeonhole. The author was sent all over the world to cover exciting history-making moments ("HCH: Might it be worth confronting the killer of Leonid Trotsky in Mexico?"), and he records such encounters with Jawaharlal Nehru, Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, the young Dalai Lama, Ho Chi Minh (who impressed him mightily), Khrushchev and many others during his travels and documentary-making into Southeast Asia and Africa from the 1950s onward.
Eloquent, bittersweet, memorable reflections.
http://www.amazon.com/Past-Present-Reporters-People-Politics/dp/0762773707/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383534359&sr=1-6&keywords=William+Stevenson
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