Thursday, April 13, 2017

Shot Down~Steve Snyder | Review

Title: Shot Down: The true story of pilot Howard Snyder and the crew of the B-17 Susan Ruth
Author: Steve Snyder
Genre: Non-fiction, History
Pages: 376
Release: August 2014

An audio copy of this book was provided by the narrator upon request through Audiobook Boom. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Review
Overall I really enjoyed listening to this tale of the crew of the Susan Ruth. The narrator did an excellent job; he has the perfect voice for these types of history books. 

This book was written by the son of the pilot of the Susan Ruth, using letters, journals, and other sources from crew members. It had a lot of interesting information about the planes used during the war and the overall demographic of those manning them. 

I did not enjoy the story as much as I had hoped to, and I think most of that was due to my expectations. The synopsis of the book makes it sound like this is going to be focused around the crew and their crash in Belgium, where those who survived had to live, hiding out, for months before the end of the war. That was what I expected going into this, but the focus was more on the overall operation and training than it was on focused on this incident. 

It was nice hearing about the various crew members, but I never really felt that connected to them. It was a very detached story, overall, and I think it would have been more emotionally charged if it had gotten more personal. We don't really know that much about the guys the book talks about. 

A nice overview of the fighter pilots and their crews during WWII. It's obvious a lot of work went into this book and that the author tried to be as accurate as possible. I learned a lot through listening and hope to learn more on further study. 

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