Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #236035 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.73 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 511 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In late 1944, London women were gathering at Woolworth's to purchase rarely available saucepans when yet another one of Hitler's Vengeance weapons left "no doubt as to the full, horrific reality" of the final German attacks: "The blow fell at lunchtime. Everyone from four-week-old babies to adults in their seventies were hurled in the air along with the debris... In shock, a woman pushing a pram, her clothes torn and askew, continued towards the store, intent on buying that saucepan." When not queuing or under attack, Londoners endured the bureaucracy put in place to handle day-to-day destruction and scarcity. Dissatisfaction was inevitable as people tired of hunger, cold, shabby clothes, crime, displacement and fear. By choosing such a momentous year as her touchstone, Waller illuminates Londoners' long-term suffering while offering insights into future obstacles to the country's rebuilding. In chapters addressing the themes of the home front-the basic struggle for food, shelter and clothing set against rationing, propaganda and social welfare-with London as the protagonist, Waller teases out of a debris-littered landscape the physical manifestations of deeper change among the city's working women, disrupted children and displaced families. 1945 may have seen the end of World War II, but not the end of bombing; the return of husbands and children to the urban center, but not the reconstruction of family or home; the end of many British war programs, but not the end of the government's involvement in the lives of the individual. In the end, the inevitable call to ensure a more personal security would result in the unseating of Winston Churchill's government. Waller, who tackled London in the late Stuart era for her last book, Ungrateful Daughters, balances an enormous amount of data with a journalistic attention to anecdote and oral history in this stunning book.
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From Booklist
Waller has written a compelling account of the final year of a valiant city's stand against the Fuhrer. Hitler's fury came in the form of supersonic V-2s, fiendish weapons impervious to all the defensive countermeasures England deployed. Waller memorializes the thousands who perished--while checking out a book at the library or riding a bus to work. She also chronicles the valor of the rescue crews who snatched hundreds from beneath the rubble. Beyond the constant threat from the skies, Londoners also coped with ubiquitous shortages by carefully husbanding rationed milk and coal and growing small victory gardens. Londoners even coped with periodic shortages of truth in censored and occasionally jingoistic media. Waller herself provides unvarnished veracity in recounting wartime prostitution in Hyde Park, London's black market, and the looting of bombing victims' goods. Even in the joy of victory, Waller discerns a dark undercurrent, as the iconic Churchill faces restive voters. Despite the postwar disillusionment, Waller marvels at how the city astride the Thames set about replacing blackened ruins with thriving new enterprises. History alive with real human faces. Bryce Christensen
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