PositiveWashington PostConveys the emotional, physical and psychical effects of having an injured and altered face, directly from those who had to deal with them ... Fitzharris offers a long history of plastic surgery ... In many ways, this is the story of a hero ... There are a lot of powerful stories in this book. But Gillies’s heroism isn’t quite enough to drive a narrative. The soldiers are treated gently and with respect, although we don’t really get to know them enough to distinguish them from one another ... Fitzharris is presented with a tricky dilemma: how to honor these men as people in their own right, and not just experimental subjects or links in the chain of Gillies’s research agenda ... We don’t always know what the soldiers thought about it all. That’s understandable ... We already knew that pain is real ... That doesn’t make the soldiers’ testimony any less powerful, empathetic and meaningful.
