Juliet Gardiner

It's quite a challenge to pick up this book with the intention to read it cover to cover - all 700 or so pages of it. I'm so glad I have. This is a book that fleshes out in considerable detail the knowledge that most of us have - or think we have - of life on the Home Front in WWII. Though scholarly, it's intensely readable, and each chapter is crammed with nuggets of fascinating information, whether it's about evacuees, the unremitting horrors of the Blitz, coping with rationing, wartime crime....anything and everything about daily life in the bleakly difficult years of the war. I'm left with a renewed respect for the citizens who coped with privation, hunger, homelessness, loss and just general dinginess, as well as surprise at the level of lawlessness among certain sections of the population. This book is a really absorbing read.… (más)

A speedy review of the Bronte sisters' lives, with extracts from their letters and journals. This book is not great on Kindle, due to the frequent illustrations with very long captions, which interrupt the flow of the text and make it a little clumsy for reading. And, honestly, if you've already read the Brontes' letters in full, or if you've read a comprehensive biography, the summing up and skimming over in this book just simply feels like it's not enough. If you want to know about the Brontes, I recommend you search out a more complete volume of their letters and let them tell you about themselves without an intermediary.

There were a number of typos, too, and a photo supposedly of Charlotte Bronte which has, for some years now, been pretty convincingly attributed to Ellen Nussey.… (más)

For the British, there is perhaps no more iconic event of the 20th century than the Blitz. The German bombing campaign that stretched from September 1940 until June 1941 was an event that people experienced throughout the British isles, from London and the southeast to Belfast in Northern Ireland. As such it was a shared experience, albeit one filtered through the personal circumstances of the individual and their particular experience of the war. Yet for all of the specific moments in which the Blitz touched their lives, it was an inescapable experience for everyone,

Encapsulating this within the covers of a single book is just one of the challenges undertaken by Juliet Gardiner in writing a history of the event. Another is to penetrate the shared mythology of the event that has grown up around it over the decades in order to convey the realities of the experience and the response of its survivors. In both respects her book is an unqualified success, as she moves beyond the "keep calm and carry on" legend to convey a more nuanced portrait of how Britons coped. For while many rose to the challenge, others faltered in response to a crisis unprecedented in its nature. Its impact proved far-reaching, forcing adjustments to a situation that unfolded in ways few anticipated. Gardiner's coverage here is impressively comprehensive, addressing everything from the shifts in official policy to the problems of looting and other criminal activities it spawned.

All of this makes Gardiner's book an excellent read for anyone seeking to learn about the Blitz. Yet its greatest strength is its focus. For while Gardiner addresses the evolution of official policy in response to the attacks, her narrative is centered primarily upon the experiences of the people themselves. By drawing upon contemporary reporting, published accounts, and the oral histories collected years afterward, she provides her readers with a superb study that conveys well the broad impact of the Blitz and its legacy for British history. For as she argues, it was from this event more than any other of the war that the commitment to the postwar "New Jerusalem" was forged. In this respect, the Blitz left an imprint upon Britain in ways that are still visible today, decades after the last craters were filled and bombed sites rebuilt.… (más)

Juliet Gardiner's Wartime is a superb social history of Britain's "Home Front" experience in the Second World War. Drawing both upon the abundant literature about the war and Mass-Observation diaries kept by contemporaries, she gives readers a real sense of what the war was like for the people of Britain. By far the best book about the subject, it is essential reading for anyone interested in learning about how Britons lived, survived, and died during the long conflict that continues to cast its shadow upon the nation.… (más)