An interesting look at the life of Alan Cope as related to artist Emmanuel Guibert.

Possible spoilers ahead:

The book focuses on Alan's life from his being drafted at 18 to his starting his career as a civilian employee of the US Army in Europe with a few anecdotes from before and after that period.

Alan's wartime experiences are exceptionally interesting because of what doesn't happen. Due to a variety of reasons he barely sees any combat despite being drafted at the same time as many who likely participated in D-Day or joined the fight shortly after. A lucky thing for him considering he ended up in an armored reconnaissance platoon. That's normally one of the more dangerous jobs in the Army.

Probably as a result, he ended up far more willing to fraternize with civilians after the war, even though such fraternization was forbidden. That fraternization largely shaped his post-war life.

As enjoyable as the book is, I am disappointed with the decision made by Guibert to treat this as a piece of art instead of history. He admits to not correcting mistake's in Alan's memories. I think this was itself a mistake. He could have left Alan's story unchanged while still footnoting such things where he was aware of them.

Similarly, he fails to interject any information not provided by Alan. For example, I'm guessing that Alan was drafted early enough to have participated in D-Day if his Army career had gone differently, but that's based on guesswork because there are very few dates given in the book, not even Alan's date of birth!

Again, if Guibert didn't want to mess with Alan's narrative, he could have still included a timeline in an appendix.

These problems make this book less useful from a historical perspective, but still an interesting read.