Eastern Approaches
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 12th pr.,
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: worn with some tears and minor damage Page Condition: Yellowed, tanning. Markings: unmkd. Binding condition: Binding intact. All fold-out maps and plates intact.
Few memoirs manage to read like a thriller while remaining scrupulously true — Eastern Approaches is one of them. Fitzroy Maclean's remarkable autobiography chronicles three extraordinary chapters of a life lived at full throttle: his daring solo journeys through Soviet Central Asia in the late 1930s, where he traversed forbidden territories few Westerners had ever seen; his front-line service with the SAS in North Africa and the Middle East during World War II; and his parachute mission behind enemy lines into Yugoslavia, where he served as Winston Churchill's personal envoy to the partisan leader Josip Broz Tito. Maclean writes with the cool authority of a man for whom danger was simply the terrain of daily life, his prose precise and unsentimental yet shot through with dry wit and acute political intelligence. The book stands as a foundational text of twentieth-century adventure writing, widely credited as one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming's James Bond — and once read, it is not difficult to see why. Whether navigating Stalinist show trials, desert warfare, or Balkan guerrilla campaigns, Maclean presents a world of breathtaking complexity and moral ambiguity that leaves the reader wondering how a single lifetime could contain so much.
Author: Fitzroy Maclean
Format: Hardback
Published: 1951, Jonathan Cape
Genre: Travel & exploration
Edition: 12th pr.,
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: worn with some tears and minor damage Page Condition: Yellowed, tanning. Markings: unmkd. Binding condition: Binding intact. All fold-out maps and plates intact.
Few memoirs manage to read like a thriller while remaining scrupulously true — Eastern Approaches is one of them. Fitzroy Maclean's remarkable autobiography chronicles three extraordinary chapters of a life lived at full throttle: his daring solo journeys through Soviet Central Asia in the late 1930s, where he traversed forbidden territories few Westerners had ever seen; his front-line service with the SAS in North Africa and the Middle East during World War II; and his parachute mission behind enemy lines into Yugoslavia, where he served as Winston Churchill's personal envoy to the partisan leader Josip Broz Tito. Maclean writes with the cool authority of a man for whom danger was simply the terrain of daily life, his prose precise and unsentimental yet shot through with dry wit and acute political intelligence. The book stands as a foundational text of twentieth-century adventure writing, widely credited as one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming's James Bond — and once read, it is not difficult to see why. Whether navigating Stalinist show trials, desert warfare, or Balkan guerrilla campaigns, Maclean presents a world of breathtaking complexity and moral ambiguity that leaves the reader wondering how a single lifetime could contain so much.