Ratings
Rated: 1 times. Average rating 5
Description
Of all the accounts written about the Second World War, none are more compelling than the personal diaries of those who lived through it. Private Battles, bestselling author Simon Garfield has interwoven the diaries of four ordinary people as they struggle to cope with the day-to-day reality of life during the Second World War. Readers of Our Hidden Lives and We Are At War will be familiar with two of the diarists: Maggie Joy Blunt, the perceptive but frustrated young writer living near Slough, and Pam Ashford, the shipping clerk in Glasgow writing of office life as if it were an episode of The Archers. The two new diarists are equally engrossing: Edward Stebbing, a 20-year-old soldier from Essex; and Ernest van Someren, a research chemist from Hertfordshire, father of two children and proposer of several unique scientific ways to beat the Nazis. Private Battles turns much of the traditional view of Britain's war effort on its head. Churchill does not emerge as the universally popular wartime figure; the country is not a fit and streamlined unit ready to fend off any foe, but an exhausted, divided and ailing one; and while there are many examples of a Dunkirk spirit, there are just as many of spiteful behaviour and selfishness. Perhaps here, for the first time, is the true story of how the ordinary people of Britain won the Second World War. And of how we almost didn't.
Books by Simon Garfield:
- The Error World (2008)
- Private Battles (2007)
- On the Map (2012)
- Just My Type (2011)
- To the Letter (2013)
- Mauve (2001)
- Exposure (2009)
