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 | | Austerity Britain: 1945-51 (Tales of a New Jerusalem) by David Kynaston ISBN-10: 9780747579854 ISBN-10: 0-7475-7985-7 ISBN-13: 9780747579854 ISBN-13: 978-0-7475-7985-4 Hardcover 2007-07 Bloomsbury UK Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Coursing through "Austerity Britain" is an astonishing variety of voices - vivid, unselfconscious, and unaware of what the future holds. A Chingford housewife endures the tribulations of rationing; a retired schoolteacher observes during a royal visit how well-fed the Queen looks; a pernickety civil servant in Bristol is oblivious to anyone's troubles but his own. An array of working-class witnesses describe how life in post-war Britain is, with little regard for liberal niceties or the feelings of their 'betters'. Many of these voices will stay with the reader in future volumes, jostling alongside well-known figures like John Arlott (here making his first radio broadcast, still in police uniform), Glenda Jackson (taking the 11+) and Doris Lessing (newly arrived from Africa, struck by the levelling poverty of postwar Britain. David Kynaston weaves a sophisticated narrative of how the victorious 1945 Labour government shaped the political, economic and social landscape for the next three decades. Deeply researched, often amusing and always intensely entertaining and readable, the first volume of David Kynaston's ambitious history offers an entirely fresh perspective on Britain during those six momentous years. | ||
Reviews | ||
Rich treatment of austerity Written for a British eye more than for an American, this American learned a stronger respect for the people of Britain for the way they won the war and then won back their share of industry and prosperity. Having won a glorious victory, within hours the victorious citizens of the country that sustained almost six years of war following on a prolonged depression realized that the trials of war time would be extended by the austerity of post-war Europe. While England won the war, they paid a high price. More important, the collective, heroic efforts of the large working class produced a tide of enthusiasm for nationalisation of industry, housing to replace the hundreds of thousands displaced by German bombing, and a broad social welfare plan focusing primarily on health care. It is not a pretty story. Post-war England was drab, lacking many basics, watching its empire dissolve, and driven by a strong, centralized plan to restore the economy that changed the basic way people looked at business and government. And, with the continuing pressures of rebuilding the rest of Europe, the threat of further communist expansion, and the rise of American power, perhaps Britain went too far in moving towards a benevolent but often clumsy and experimental form of socialism. It would be almost another forty years and the decisions of the Thatcher government, that saw the maturity and, in some cases, the reversal of this social and cultural experiment. This is a long, dense and colorful book, full of first-person details and observations, many of them from the surveys and observations of the government itself. Chapters focus on various aspects of the cultural and social revolution, in the classroom, on the factory floor, in the (mine) pits, in the shops, in the media, and more. At one bookstore where I looked for the book, they claimed that it was a textbook and not part of their trade book collection. While it is as thorough -- or more -- as any academic textbook, it reads more like a highly detailed, multi-authored journal or catalog of the period. Invest the time. | ||
Perfect Complement to "The Last Thousand Days" I bought this book at the same time I purchased Peter Clarke's marvelous "The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire" on what I thought the reasonable assumption that it might provide the social history complement to Clarke's account of the geopolitical death rattles of the Empire following the war. That it precisely served that function better than I could have imagined does not in any way diminish its value as a brilliant stand-alone analysis of everyday life in post-war Britain that will certainly never be duplicated in either its scholarship or compass. Kynaston weaves an incredibly rich fabric of first-person accounts and commentaries ranging from housewives to the Labour party's leadership to incipient and established entertainers to sports stars and innumerable others high and low on the social scale, each citation perfectly apt and illustrative in its context. The reader feels he is living the period, suffering with the deprived homemaker, hoping against experience with the coal miner, sensing pitfalls to the social planning completely unanticipated at the time, and generally acquiring an understanding of those years that completely supplants everything one thought one knew of the subject. The book is a bit of a slog what with over 600 pages of text, and in my experience, there are very few works of this size that are worth the time an effort. Be assured that this is one of them and that every reader is looking forward to the promised sequel covering the years 1953-79. Social history, indeed, history, doesn't get much better than this. | ||
austerity Britain An excellent description of that time in England. Brought back a lot of memories. Probably less interesting to folks who had NOT lived through it. | ||
How we lived through tough times. Austerity Britain presents an interesting retrospective on the tough times in the immediate post-war era. It is a good companion/follow on to "How we lived then" about the actual war years. Some of the political philosophy, particularly in the earlier chapters can be a bit heavy going, but the view on what it was like to live through the period is good, particularly if you did actually survive those years, as did this reviewer. | ||
Austerity Britain A very nice journey into the past, where you as the traveler, are entertained, amazed and surprised at how the English people survived the war. I was entranced to read how the English took everything, well actually, without anything that we all took for granted, in stride. They suffered the most during the war and gave their all for victory. This is a wonderful story told as how it was to live, eat, entertain and get on. | ||