	45% buy the item featured on this page: My Boy Jack?: The Search for Kipling's Only Son 5.0 out of 5 stars (1)
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5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written and deeply moving, 7 Mar 1999

By A Customer

The English writer Rudyard Kipling spent the last twenty years of his life in an obsessive, fruitless search for his only son John (Jack), who had gone missing during the Battle of Loos in 1915. John was barely 18, had only got into the army through his father's influence (he was medically unfit), and was last seen struggling through the carnage, shot in the mouth and weeping. His body was never found.

Major and Mrs Holt are renowned experts on the First World War and this is probably their best book yet. (The title is taken from Kipling's poem 'Have You News of My Boy Jack?') Many biographies of Rudyard Kipling describe the loss of John, but this is the first biography of John himself. Through painstaking and meticulous research, the Holts have built a detailed reconstruction of John's life and character. The story is told with honesty and compassion, but without lapsing into sentimentality. It is fascinating, compulsively readable, and deeply touching. The book also contains new evidence to suggest that, sadly, the recent "discovery" of John Kipling's grave is almost certainly erroneous.

Those who have read other books by Major and Mrs Holt will be familiar with their warm but down-to-earth narrative style. In this case, however, they have not only written a first class biography of a tragic victim of the Great War, they have, in some small measure, given John Kipling his life back. -- Rebecca Mazonowicz (author of 'This Wretched Splendour')

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