The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940 Author: Visit Amazon's William Manchester Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0385313314 | Format: EPUB
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940 Description
Review
“Manchester has such control over a huge and moving narrative, such illumination of character . . . that he can claim the considerable achievement of having assembled enough powerful evidence to support Isaiah Berlin’s judgment of Churchill as ‘the largest human being of our time.’”
—The New Yorker “Memorable.”
—San Francisco Chronicle “Stirring . . . As Manchester points out several times, it’s as if the age, having produced a Hitler, then summoned Churchill as the only figure equal to the task of vanquishing him. The years
Alone are the pivotal years of Churchill’s career.”
—The Boston Sunday Globe “The best Churchill biography [for] this generation . . . Even readers who know the basic story will find much that is new.”
—Newsweek “A triumph . . . equal in stature to the first volume of the series.”
—Newsday “Vivid . . . history in the grand manner.”
—The Washington Post “Compelling reading.”
—The Times (London)About the Author
William Manchester was a hugely successful popular historian and renowned biographer. In addition to the three volumes of
The Last Lion, his books include
Goodbye, Darkness, A World Lit Only by Fire, The Glory and the Dream, The Arms of Krupp, American Caesar, and
The Death of a President, as well as assorted works of journalism. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal and the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award. He passed away in 2004.
- Paperback: 800 pages
- Publisher: Bantam; 8.4.1989 edition (September 3, 1989)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385313314
- ISBN-13: 978-0385313315
- Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 1.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
I have been nervously awaiting this book for years. My first encounter with Manchester came when volume one first came out. I was a child, and I went to visit my grandmother (who was in London during the Blitz); she held the book up to show me what she was reading. "The man." she said. "The great, great man."
Years later, I read the first two volumes almost in one sitting - couldn't put them down - and have reread large parts of them over the years (every time I looked some piece up I'd find myself sitting down for an hour or two because I couldn't stop). I remember when Finest Hour reported that the trilogy would never be finished: it was like a punch in the stomach.
I had my doubts about the ability of another author to write worthily of Manchester, and I was afraid this volume wouldn't measure up. No need to worry: this is every bit as much a page-turner as the last two volumes. It's not QUITE Manchester - I thought I could feel a bit of a difference in style, somehow - and yet it IS extremely good, much better than I had expected.
Like the first two volumes, we begin with a preamble ("The Lion Hunted") in which we are (re-)acquainted with the book's subject. There is a certain amount of repetition of material from the two earlier preambles, but much good new material as well. I've read thousands of pages on Churchill, but even I found some good new anecdotes and quotations here. After that we're hurled right into the middle of the most dramatic days of World War Two. The unexpected, catastrophic defeats; the incompetence and perfidy of the people in charge of France - it doesn't take much from a writer to make this an exciting story, and yet I don't think it has ever been told better than this. Really, just what I had hoped for from Manchester himself.
William Manchester's first Churchill volume covers the first fifty eight years of Winston's life. His second, "Alone," covers just eight. Assuming that there will be a third, it will cover the final quarter century, including most of World War II and Churchill's two spells as Prime Minister. To the elementary observer, these divisions seem somewhat out of sorts.
It's only by reading that middle volume that we understand just how critical those eight years were. Above all, "Alone" is a morality play -- the best one I know -- about what happens when democracies fail to confront aggression. At no other time in the 20th Century were so many people so wrong about a matter as grave as the Nazi buildup in the 1930s. Only Winston Churchill and a few of his cohorts disagreed at the time.
Early in the book, Manchester briefly lays out a powerful case for Britain's aversion to confronting Germany. Britain sensed the unfairness of the Versailles "diktat," and reacted strongly against it. To a great degree, London was fed up with France's insolence after the war, both in its lust for revenge against Germany, and in the flaccid disillusionment of Paris intellectuals. At the same time, Great Britain was a nation cornered by two bloodthirsty wolves -- Nazism and Bolshevism. In order to defeat the other, one would have to be appeased. Being a country dominated by aristocrats, Britain chose to enlist Hitler as a bulwark against Communism. In doing so, they ignored the basic fact of geopolitical proximity: only Germany, abutting France and a few hundred miles away from Britain's shores, had the capacity to strike at the West. Britain's aristocrats bet wrong, and Churchill, ever the "traitor to his class" immediately recognized it.
Churchill's story also holds valuable lessons for us today.
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