New book announcement:
The Colonel of Tamarkan: Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai

This is a copy of an email to Roger Mansell

Dear Mr Mansell,

I was given your name by Neil MacPherson with whom I have been liasing over the last couple of years as I finished my new biography of my grandfather, Philip Toosey. The book is due out in September, to be published in the UK and Australia by Simon & Schuster and entitled: The Colonel of Tamarkan: Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai. We haven’t yet got a US publisher for it but my agent in NY is about to get copies of the proofs and will set to work once he has those.

Neil asked me to get in touch with you and tell you about the book just in case you might be interested in it for your website. The book inevitably looks at the story of the film and how that differs from the real story but it is not an exercise in David Lean bashing as my grandfather thought it was a grand film, just not true in terms of what he and others did in Thailand.

Below is a very brief synopsis:

THE COLONEL OF TAMARKAN

Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai

JULIE SUMMERS

Alec Guinness won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the dogmatic but brittle commanding officer in David Lean's film "The Bridge on the River Kwai". While a brilliant performance, it owed more to fiction than fact, as the man who actually commanded the POWs ordered to build the infamous bridges -- there were in fact two: one wooden, one concrete -- was cut from very different cloth.

Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey, the senior officer among the 3,000-odd Allied servicemen in Tamarkan prison camp had to comply with Japanese orders to help construct their Thailand-Burma railway. With malnutrition, disease and brutality their constant companions, it was a near-impossible task for men who had already endured terrible privations but under Toosey's careful direction, a subtle balancing act between compliance and subversion, the Allied inmates not only survived but
regained some of their self-respect.

Re-creating the story of this remarkable leader with tremendous skill and narrative flair, and drawing on many original interviews with Second World War POWs from the Asian theatre, The Colonel Of Tamarkan is a riveting blend of biography and history.

Julie Summers is a writer and researcher, and the granddaughter of Sir Philip Toosey. She is the author of several previous books including Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine. Julie lives with her husband and three sons in Oxford.