BY THE BOOK

The Korean Kid, Rochelle Nicholls, BSP, $29.99

JIM Kichenside was a Sydney boy who grew up near Mascot airport in the 1930s. Watching some of the pioneers of aviation taking off and landing, he dreamt of one day learning to fly and earn his pilot’s wings. But he was from a poor family that struggled for most of his early years through the deprivations of the Great Depression and then the wartime strictures of rationing. In 1949, while working in a job he never really wanted to do, he saw an ad in a newspaper asking “Think you’d make a flyer?” It was a recruitment ad for the RAAF. He had joined and gained his wings in time to be sent to Korea to join the 77 Squadron fighting alongside UN troops against the communist North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War. With only a handful of hours “conversion training”, he was soon flying one of the RAAF’S first jet fighters, the Gloster Meteor F.8, on combat missions. Nicholls writes vividly of Kichenside’s early years, his time in Korea and his life after the war.

THE Disney Corporation cops a lot of flak for the way it takes traditional folk tales or wellknown works of fiction and overromanticises, santises or otherwise tries to embellish stories in a way that is typical to Disney but that somehow messes with the flavour, intent or just the original charm of those tales. Its 1998 animated musical version of the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, the Chinese peasant woman who dresses as a man to take her ageing father’s place in the emperor’s army, was widely