A lively and rigorous deep dive into the ambiguous, still-relevant geopolitical odyssey that Churchill represents.
An authoritative examination of how Winston Churchill’s ongoing geopolitical impact refracts and supersedes his actual biography.
Former Spectator literary editor Wheatcroft brings superior scholarship, controlled, intermittently witty prose, and warts-and-all admiration to the acknowledged surfeit of writing about Churchill. With an evenhanded perspective, he explores how textuality and reputation simultaneously distort and amplify Churchill’s impact. “I’ve tried to write as what Keynes called ‘the historian of Opinion’, seeing Churchill through the eyes of his contemporaries,” he writes, providing a sinewy account of Churchill’s strange, singular life, with its political fluctuations, admirable and shameful qualities, and repeated seasons of rise and fall. “Churchill’s life until the age of sixty-five,” the author writes about his “apotheosis” in 1940, “had certainly been a dramatic roller-coaster ride of highs and lows…until that ultimate and complete triumph.” Wheatcroft adds materially to this well-known narrative by exploring “the darker side of his character and career, too often brushed over, and the long shadow which he has cast since his death.” The author vividly depicts every dramatic stage of Churchill’s experience, from a privileged upbringing propelling him from colonial adventurism to journalism and politics, through the disaster of Gallipoli during World War I, to his “wilderness years” of lucrative book deals and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, to his “walking with destiny” as Britain’s savior against Hitler. The author achieves a strong balance between crisp, dramatic historical storytelling and the words and views of both Churchill’s many contemporaries—not least the scoundrels comprising his inner circle—and the scholars and writers who have addressed his enigma ever since. His posthumous legend became ever more diffuse—e.g., after 9/11, when George W. Bush and Tony Blair adopted the Churchillian mantle in inaccurate and grotesque ways: “the Iraq War had gone horribly, and predictably, wrong but Blair was impenitent.”
A lively and rigorous deep dive into the ambiguous, still-relevant geopolitical odyssey that Churchill represents.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-324-00276-5
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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