Tom Kratman's 3 favorite reads in 2023

This book is a history of the Battle of Britain, but one focusing more on the common folk and non-aviation personnel that held England together, upright, and unconquered during the German onslaught that followed the collapse of France. Meticulously researched, painstakingly analyzed, and somewhat shocking in its conclusions.

Lord, what an eye-opener! This book shows just how deep into totalitarianism a democracy can sink, just how fascistic a democracy can become overnight, and just how riven with class strife and unfair treatment the UK was throughout the battle.

Here are a few examples of the things that were happening during that time.

1) Given the shortage of coal miners and an unwillingness to pay the miners a fair wage, something on the order of twenty thousand young men were effectively enslaved, not conscripted to fight, but enslaved, to mine coal.

2) The British people were lied to consistently and continuously to keep up their willingness to endure suffering, danger, and privation.

3) The common folk were poorly fed and, for months, barred from using the subway systems for shelter, while the aristocrats and the rich had plenty of food and good shelter from the bombing. And who would have guessed that the Cockneys would have booed the King and Queen as they inspected the damage from the German bombing, yet they did.

One would like to think the US would never have put up with it. One suspects we might have, too.

It wasn’t just the cities that felt the hard hand of self-imposed totalitarianism in the UK during World War II. Oh, no, the farms as well were brought into line, as they really had to be, to enable the British to eat without having reliable supplies coming by sea. 

This book, which was also a BBC television series, involves three moderns, two men and a woman, all historians or archeologists, taking over an old and somewhat run-down farm and trying to run it using what was available, and enduring what was imposed, during the Second World War. 

It is a fascinating story of making do, making it yourself, or doing without, not just applicable to my own writing projects, but to the broader human condition under hardship. 

I loved this book mainly because I detest modern literary fiction. Why? It strikes me as being pointless exercises in self-indulgent style over substance, largely nihilistic, and simply rotten storytelling. There are exceptions, and, of course, they are exceptional. Few of those exceptions are modern. 

Myers wrote this earlier, as a lengthy article in The Atlantic. It was the attacks from literary critics in love with the latest pointless exercises in style that prompted him to expand on the article to really twist the knife.