The reader also sees a man in his moods, as war news comes in, a man with appetites for eating, drinking, smoking, and talking till the wee hours of the morning. Clementine Churchill became quite concerned with conditions in the shelters, where many chose to sleep when there was a “bombers’ moon.”įinally, there is the Great Man himself, never quite stepping off his mythic pedestal, uplifting the populace with regular tours of bombed areas, speaking by radio to the nation.

One appreciates Larson’s attention to the morale of the English people undergoing repeated attacks in the cities. Happily, Larson also inserts chapters to reveal the thinking of Göring, head of the Luftwaffe Goebbels, propaganda minister and Rudolph Hess, who landed a plane in Scotland in a futile attempt to negotiate a peace in 1941. Larson accesses diaries, letters, public “Mass-Observation” accounts, in addition to the standard studies, to give a close picture, month by month, of Churchill, his family, and his closest colleagues. Given all that has been written about Winston Churchill and the war years, the author sought a more intimate story: what it was like for the prime minister and his circle during 19, after Dunkirk, when England stood alone facing the Nazi juggernaut. Erik Larson seems to be an industry unto himself. AFTER READING this study and skimming the end sections, I stand in awe: what one man can research, consolidate, and narrate in prose that reads like a novel.

The splendid and the vile book review