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The People's War
The People's War
Oct 6, 2024 4:37 PM

Author:Angus Calder

The People's War

The Second World War was, for Britain, a 'total war'; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy.

In this comprehensive and engrossing narrative Angus Calder presents not only the great events and leading figures but also the oddities and banalities of daily life on the Home Front, and in particular the parts played by ordinary people: air raid wardens and Home Guards, factory workers and farmers, housewives and pacifists. Above all this revisionist and important work reveals how, in those six years, the British people came closer to discarding their social conventions than at any time since Cromwell's republic.

Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1970, The People’s War draws on oral testimony and a mass of neglected social documentation to question the popularised image of national unity in the fight for victory.

Reviews

Full of vivid anecdote … and of epigrammatic flair … it is a dense, detailed, moving chronicle.

—— Richard Eyre , Independent on Sunday

A tour de force of historical reconstruction

—— Sunday Times

The People's War is more than a salutary iconoclastic analysis of its period and more than an immensely fastidious social history. It is full of vivid anecdote...and of epigrammatic flair... I've read Angus Calder's book several times and passed it on to friends. I've commissioned and directed several plays and films which have been inspired by it. It is a dense, detailed, moving chronicle that I am still unable to read without feeling both nostalgia and pain for the unfulfilled promise of the world I was born into

—— Richard Eyre , Independent on Sunday

No verdict can I pronounce on The People's War other than, read it

—— Elizabeth Bowen , Spectator

He has provided an engrossing, beautifully organized book that could provide a valuable education for the post-war generation and a salutary re-education for his elders

—— Phillip French , Financial Times

The best social history of the second world war

—— John Vincent , Sunday Telegraph

Wow. Evil Geniuses is engaging, enraging, enthralling, appalling; a true tour de force. And most of all, it's the truth - about how these rapacious bastards have picked this country's bones for the last fifty years, and what the rest of us need to do to turn the tables. . . Exactly the book we need right now.

—— Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast columnist and author of If We Can Keep It

Back when the idea of President Reagan still seemed a stretch and President Trump was barely a joke, some serious, smart, committed people with vast appetites and little shame - right-wing intellectuals and billionaires, CEOs and Washington hustlers - launched a long war to create a paradigm shift and rewrite our social contract to their benefit. Andersen's dazzling, mind-bending, must-read chronicle of that fifty-year crusade explains how it happened, why it succeeded, and, unsettlingly, what that victory means: America is now theirs.

—— John Heilemann, co-host of Showtime’s The Circus, co-author of Game Change and Double Down

How did the United States turn from its long-standing egalitarian ideals to its present course of socially and morally catastrophic inequality? Kurt Andersen interrogates the past half century with characteristic intellectual ambition and literary bravado to find out. At once cultural history, memoir, and riff, Evil Geniuses explains how our country found its way into this predicament, and how we might yet get out of it.

—— Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy and Ronald Reagan

This book is the culmination of a lifetime's work in the country and is suffused with a love and knowledge that only such long acquaintance can bring

—— Hugh Thomson , Spectator

Passionate and profoundly engaged... [Davis'] presentation of the great river as Colombia's Mississippi, its fountain of music, the source of its many contradictions...generates an impact that few travel books can muster.

—— Brian Morton , Tablet

Music and myth, commerce and colonialism, indigeneity and identity: Magdalena is as impressively exploratory in approach as it is encyclopaedic in scope

—— Oliver Balch , Times Literary Supplement

From palatial Aztec botanic gardens to Qing Dynasty evolutionary theories, Horizons upends traditional accounts of the history of science, showing how curiosity and intellectual exploration was, and is, a global phenomenon

—— Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred

Remarkable. Challenges almost everything we know about science in the West

—— Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in 12 Maps

This perspective-shattering book challenges our Eurocentric narrative by spotlighting the work of historically neglected scientists

—— Caroline Sanderson , The Bookseller, 'Editor's Choice'

A useful corrective that brings us closer to a more accurate history of Western science - one which recognises Europe, not as exceptional, but as learning from the world

—— Angela Saini, author of Superior

The righting of the historical record makes Horizons a deeply satisfying read. We learn about a fascinating group of people engaged in scientific inquiry all over the world. Even more satisfyingly, Horizons demonstrates that the most famous scientists - Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein among them - couldn't have made their discoveries without the help of their global contacts

—— Valerie Hansen, author of The Year 1000

A provocative examination of major contributions to science made outside Europe and the USA, from ancient to modern times, explained in relation to global historical events. I particularly enjoyed the stories of individuals whose work tends to be omitted from standard histories of science

—— Ian Stewart, author of Significant Figures

A wonderful, timely reminder that scientific advancement is, and has always been, a global endeavour

—— Patrick Roberts, author of Jungle

This is the kind of history we need: it opens our eyes to the ways in which what we know today has been uncovered thanks to a worldwide team effort

—— Michael Scott, author of Ancient Worlds

An important milestone

—— British Journal for the History of Science, on Materials of the Mind

The freshest history of the strangest science

—— Alison Bashford, author of Global Population, on Materials of the Mind

Ambitious, riveting, Poskett tracks the global in so many senses . . . vital reading on some of the most urgent concerns facing the world history of science

—— Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge, on Materials of the Mind

Terrific . . . [Makes] a substantial contribution to understanding the universalizing properties of science and technology in history

—— Janet Browne, Harvard University, on Materials of the Mind

Horizons forces me to think outside my Eurocentric box and puts science at the centre of world history

—— David Reynolds , New Statesman, Books of the Year 2022

[Our Man is] heartfelt, virtuosic and quietly thoughtful at the same time

—— Daily Telegraph

Isabel Wilkerson's book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don't miss it!

—— Cornel West

A landmark piece of non-fiction

—— The New York Times

A briliant and stirring epic

—— Wall Street Journal

The mass migration of African Americans out of the US south forever changed the country's cultural fabric - and Wilkerson's history of this period is full of sacrifice and hope ...a long overdue account

—— Guardian

A deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book. . . .Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century and told it through the lives of three people ... lyrical and tragic

—— Jill Lepore , New Yorker
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