Reviews Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Best Churchill Books for Young Readers

20 October 2024 Comments 1 Comment

Fiona Reynoldson’s “Leading Lives: Churchill,” is targeted at the young (ages 8-15). Now a quarter century old, it is still the best “juvenile” ever published, anywhere, by anybody. The “Leading Lives” series mixes Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Arafat with Roosevelt, Kennedy and Gandhi. I know nothing about the others, but Reynoldson’s Churchill is a masterpiece. So much wisdom and fair understanding is attractively wedged into sixty-four pages.

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Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman 1920-1997

20 September 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Pamela Harriman was a noble spirit devoted to friends, family and both her countries. Not many people could have journeyed so successfully and far She was grace personified, at home equally in Churchill’s air raid shelter or the Élysée Palace. President Chirac was saddened by her death: “To say that she was an exceptional representative of the U.S. does not do justice to her achievement. She lent to our longstanding alliance the radiant strength of her personality. She was elegance itself...a peerless diplomat.” That old Francophile, her father-in-law, would have smiled.

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Cita Stelzer on the Anglo-American Special Relationship

5 July 2024 Comments 0 Comments

Cita Stelzer notes that Churchill’s outgoing character, his fraternal love of his mother’s land, soon disabused his hosts of base impressions. The Anglophile journalist Frederick Wile was not the first American to go out on a limb (albeit with a nickname WSC detested): “Dynamic, brilliant, resourceful and lion-hearted, ‘Winnie’s’ path, his admirers are persuaded, one day will lead him to the premiership” (110). It would—but not quite in the way Wile expected.

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Gallipoli Peninsula 1915: Failure is an Orphan

30 May 2024 Comments 0 Comments

From May to November 1915, Churchill held a meaningless sinecure, his only task the appointment of rural judges. “Like a sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted,” he wrote, “my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it; I had vehement convictions and small power to give effect to them.… I was forced to remain a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat.”

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Dardanelles Straits 1915: Success Has a Thousand Fathers

25 May 2024 Comments 1 Comment

It is widely believed that Churchill proposed the expedition to the Dardanelles Straits to bypass the static slaughter in Europe’s trenches. While this is true in the abstract, the plan was not his original vision, nor was it hatched overnight. Churchill and others first contemplated assaulting Germany and Austria-Hungary from the south. Churchill also proposed attacking Germany from the north, even as the Dardanelles operation was being approved by the War Cabinet.

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“Empire First”: the Bowman War on Churchill’s D-Day

24 February 2024 Comments 2 Comments

Greenock, Scotland, played a noble part in Britain’s war effort. Perhaps its historians might now busy themselves with a travelogue. They could tell of an old man’s courageous journeys from Greenock into U-boat-infested seas in pursuit of victory in a global war. Or they could describe the ships and munitions built in Greenock to support the “lodgment on the continent” the old man had supported since 1941. They might even mention the Mulberry Harbors, the old man’s conception that made possible a successful D-Day.

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Manchester and Reid: “The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm”

20 December 2023 Comments 2 Comments

In a flourish suitable to a great work, Paul Reid ends his story on January 30th, 1965 with the best words Lord Moran ever wrote: "The village stations on the way to Bladon were crowded with his countrymen, and at Bladon in a country churchyard, in the stillness of a winter evening, in the presence of his family and a few friends, Winston Churchill was committed to English earth, which in his finest hour he had held inviolate." Bill Manchester would like that.

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Official Biographay — Sir Martin Gilbert at Chartwell, 2006. HIs memory and devotion live on in his books and the hearts of his friends.

“In Search of Churchill,” by Martin Gilbert: An Appreciation

20 September 2023 Comments 2 Comments

"In Search of Churchill "is deeply personal—Sir Martin’s answer to all those critics over the years who accused him of being uncritical (yet all the criticisms of WSC are there). Time and again, Martin explains, he was prepared to find Churchill's tragic flaw. And then, having examined more evidence than anyone alive or dead, he would come away more impressed with hiswisdom, generosity and humanity: “I might find him adopting views with which I disagreed. But there would be nothing to cause me to think: ‘How shocking, how appalling.’”

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Williams on Her Majesty and Churchill: Get It Right

10 September 2023 Comments 0 Comments

A beautiful tribute to The Queen and Winston Churchill—only a click away—is by David Dilks. This book reminded me of it. Not because it is related to what Dr. Dilks wrote, but because it should have been. A good, short appreciation of their relationship, now that the last page has been turned for both, is needed. This paperback leaves us waiting.

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Jock: Churchill’s Cat, by Larry Kryske

10 August 2023 Comments 2 Comments

Here Kryske captures what most reporters ignore: the great man’s sadness in twilight. Clementine reminds him of all the good he had accomplished. Winston Churchill feels only remorse. “I have profound misgivings about the future. Our leaders are more concerned with appearance than substance. Grave dangers lie before us. Who will be the voice in the wilderness now?” Does that say anything to us in 2023? I fear so.

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