In 2004, John Gimlette set off across Europe, following in the footsteps of one of the greatest armies ever assembled: the United States forces of 1944–45. His guide (emotionally if not geographically) was Putnam Flint, an eighty-six-year-old Bostonian who had landed in Marseille in the midst of World War II with his tank destroyer battalion, nicknamed The Panthers. With Flint’s help, Gimlette traveled back through the war to try to grasp the physical, social, and psychological realities of the smashed and sodden continent that Europe had become. Panther Soup is the heartfelt, keenly observed—and often unexpectedly humorous—chronicle of that journey: a brilliant hybrid of travelogue and personalized military history.
From Marseille, north to Dijon and Alsace, Paris and Lorraine, across the Rhine into Germany, and eventually south through the Alps into Austria, Gimlette provides a vivid impression of the route as it is today, from spectacular landscapes to cities that have risen from cinders. He reveals the ways in which the war is both memorialized and buried, and meshes his account with recollections from Flint and other survivors they meet along the way: former enemies and refugees, heroines and résistants, children of the blitzkrieg.
Here is an uncommonly evocative mixture of past and present, a meeting of cultures, and a deeply personal assessment of one of the most tumultuous moments in world history.
“A moving, often humorous, and thoroughly enjoyable account that works as both a wartime recollection and a travelogue . . . Gimlette strikes just the right notes in juxtaposing the past and present. He has provided a fine chronicle with broad appeal.”
–Booklist
“This is a book about the appetites of war and peace–for food, sex, and human comfort–unbridled, sordid, and, somehow, in their ability to lead a civilization back to itself, redeeming.”
–The New Yorker
“Gimlette provides effervescence and eccentricity on the journey. He has reported the history thoroughly and distilled it shrewdly . . . This new excursion into history reveals another range of Gimlette’s skills.”
–Bloomberg.com
Reviews from the UK:
“Deeply moving . . . Panther Soup is an important book, reminding us of the links between old and new world, ideals and ideologies, war and peace in our phoenix-like continent. It is at once raw and erudite . . . It’s also rich in black humour and insight.”
–Guardian
“An original travel book, written in vigorous prose and exhaustively researched . . . It has at its heart a profound understanding of the ‘soup’–the chaos and madness–of war.”
–Daily Telegraph
“The war in all its messy, scrappy detail has always been more difficult to convey than the grand strategies of the generals who sent them there. [But] John Gimlette has found a useful and novel way to do so . . . Gimlette has a gift for travel writing with details of the most intimate kind, the small change and ammunition of a soldier’s life . . . Panther Soup is a subtle book, with telling testimony from the survivors of what it was actually like to fight a war with few rules.”
–Independent
“A book that works on many levels–historical guide, social history, moving reunion of people and place–and does each superbly.”
–Wanderlust (Book of the Month)
“John Gimlette has a nose for the incongruous and the nonsensical. He glories in tracking down rogues, fantasists and eccentrics, and delights in preposterous sights and improbable juxtapositions. He is a dazzling entertainer . . . For his third book, Gimlette is geographically much closer to home, in the heart of Europe. But this is no ordinary saunter through familiar landscapes and well-chewed attitudes.”
–Sunday Telegraph
“John Gimlette undertakes an extraordinary odyssey in this book . . . This is an effectual account full of telling detail.”
–Irish Times
John Gimlette has won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and the Wanderlust Travel Writing Award, and he writes regularly for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and Condé Nast Traveller. When not traveling, he practices law in London, where he lives with his family.
