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CLEMENT ATTLEE

Name: CLEMENT ATTLEE
Author: John Bew
ISBN: 978-0-19-020340-5

THE MAN WHO MADE MODERN BRITAIN

by John Bew ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2017

The “invisible man” gets his well-deserved due in this thorough new biography.

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Detailed, philosophical biography of the unprepossessing, longtime leader of the British Labour Party, who laid out a “new deal” for the postwar Britons and cut imperial ties.

Winning control of the British government from 1945 to 1951, in what became known as the “post-war consensus,” Clement Attlee (1883-1967) and his Labour Party engineered the much-lauded National Health Service, propelled the United Nations and NATO, and granted independence to India, Burma, and Ceylon, as well as letting loose Palestine and Persia. In this thoughtful new appraisal, Bew (History and Foreign Policy, War Studies Department, King’s Coll., London; Castlereagh: The Biography of a Statesman, 2012, etc.) delves into a richly complicated postwar British society and politics to show how this once-underestimated politician can lend valuable lessons to the new generation of Labour, crushed in the election defeat of 2015. Rather incredibly, Attlee was able to beat the previous prime minister, his former ally Winston Churchill, in 1945, and preside over “a radical government in an age of austerity.” A 30-something captain during the Mesopotamian Campaign of World War I who had taken part in the Gallipoli landings, Attlee was wounded in the buttocks. A slight Victorian gentleman of the upper classes, he had studied classics at Oxford and converted to socialism after discovering the work of William Morris, John Ruskin’s disciple and author of the influential News from Nowhere. Attlee championed the rights of the working classes, abandoning his legal studies for full-time work for the socialist cause in ethnically diverse East London. Bew gradually pursues Attlee’s embrace of national politics as he gained traction as a “reliable foot soldier” under Britain’s first Labour Party PM Ramsay MacDonald, then bided his time as leader of Labour during the next decade’s setbacks and acted as Churchill’s deputy in government during World War II. Labour’s “jaw-dropping” victory of 1945 ensured that Attlee was not just “a passenger of history,” but a major protagonist.

The “invisible man” gets his well-deserved due in this thorough new biography.

Pub Date: March 1, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-19-020340-5

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
TITANS OF HISTORY
by Simon Sebag Montefiore with John Bew Martyn Frampton Dan Jones & Claudia Renton

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.