Rating: 
Summary: Engaging, moving, brilliant.
Review: This Battle of Britain pilot has left us with a real gem; a classically engaging description of his experience of training, being shot down, and his amazing recovery.One thing that makes this work great, and enables it to stand above other similar books, is Hillary's ability to describe his emotions; to explain his thoughts at the time, and those of his colleagues. This book puts things into perspective - it is the memoir of a true hero.
Rating:
Summary: A well-written Spitfire pilot's story
Review: This is a beautifully written account of one pilot's participation in a crucial WW2 battle. The book does not fall flat because the author spent only a relatively brief period in action; his description of his privileged period at Oxford, and of fighter training at the beginning of the time, are worth reading in their own right. However, the real subject of this book is the recovery (sadly incomplete) he made from the horrific burns suffered after being shot down on the War's first anniversary. Burns treatment was crude before the outbreak of WW2, and shot-down pilots were the guinea pigs who enabled huge advances in this field to be made. (Hillary's plastic surgeon was the great Sir Archibald McIndoe.) Hillary's courage in fighting his way to this recovery, and the candour with which he describes it, make this book the best memoir I have read of the War.
Rating:
Summary: A pilot's story: beyond the gunsight.
Review: This is not simply the story of a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain. It is an account of dawning self-realisation in a twenty year old man, experiencing battle, injury and loss. Hillary takes us from the rarified air of pre-war Oxbridge priviledge, into the Battle of Britain. It is during this period that Hillary is shot down in flames, suffering disfiguring burns to his face and hands. For many months following, Hillary undergoes agonising facial reconstruction. As we find from his book, whilst enduring this bodily transformation, and experiencing the loss of his closest pilot friends, he is also reconstructing his psychic self. The Last Enemy is an invaluable read as a personal account of air warfare, and as a social commentary on the Oxbridge Volunteer Reservists. However, it is Hillary's exploration of himself, in the face of tragedy, to make sense of his suffering, and that of wider humanity, that marks this (sometimes uneven) read out as a truly profound article of wartime literature.
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