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.
Immortalized in Churchill's often quoted assertion that never before "was so much owed by so many to so few," the top-down narrative of the Battle of Britain has been firmly established in British legend: Britain was saved from German invasion by the gallant band of Fighter Command Pilots in their Spitfires and Hurricanes, and the public owed them their freedom. Richard North's radical re-evaluation of the Battle of Britain dismantles this mythical retelling of events. Taking a wider perspective than the much-discussed air war, North takes a fresh look at the conflict as a whole to show that the civilian…
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.
During World War Two Britain had to look to the land to provide the produce it had previously shipped in from abroad, meaning huge changes on both the agricultural and domestic scenes. Accompanying an 8-part BBC series and written by the three presenters who spend a year living on a reconstructed farm from the era, Wartime Farm sets these changes within a historical context and looks at the day-to-day life of that time. Exploring a fascinating chapter in Britain's recent history, we see how our predecessors lived and thrived in difficult conditions with extreme frugality and ingenuity. From growing your…
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.
"A welcome contrarian take on the state of contemporary American prose."-The Wall Street Journal
The funny and devastating debunking of high "literary" prose stylists, including Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx, and Cormac McCarthy, that caused a literary furor.
1462: An alien who feasts on suffering dines off the agonies of Vlad the Impaler’s twenty-thousand victims near Targoviste, Romania. 1688: A woman, framed for witchcraft, is hanged by the neck in Boston.
1965: A toy store in Boston never seems to run out of special toys and is suspected of being the location of a temporal portal. 2022: A grandfather, visiting the Boston of his youth with his grandchildren, is shown that portal by his granddaughters.
And they’re off! Off through the gate that grants wishes, off to deal with time travel, off to break and enter, off to endure the pain of seeing afresh loved ones long since departed in their own time. They’re off to deal with hardened, murderous criminals, and equally murderous aliens.
