Hardit Singh Malik was an Indian who served during WWI in the air forces for Britain.
Looking at the cover, I was expecting the book to be about Malik and his service. A lot of it is, but a lot of it focuses on the political issues that surrounded the troubles Malik faced dealing with the British Government and military. Malik almost felt like a side character in his own book.
Normally, I would read through the appendices, but I was just glad for the book to be over. The issues were repeated, and I felt like I could almost predict where some parts were going. For example, I feel like I read about fitting in related to organized sports in Britain at least three times. And that's not even one of the Indian-British relations that are referred to consistently.
Overall, the book was organized in a chronological way, but the chapters aren't solely focused on Malik. If you're interested in the issues going on around that time, I suppose the book could be interesting. I wanted to learn about Malik. The amount of time spent discussing his actual air service wasn't as much as I expected, so that was disappointing. It looked like from the time Malik's service truly started and the conclusion was only about 120 pages (Kindle version). The conclusion talked again about the issues almost as much or more than Malik.
Hardit Singh Malik was a pioneer in his time, and he did write his own autobiography called A Little Work, A Little Play. I couldn't find a copy of that, so I tried this book. It wasn't an easy read for me, and that may have been due to my expectations. It was a miss for me.
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