Bridgman reviewed Hero of the empire by Candice Millard
Review of 'Hero of the empire' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
If you're like me, your primary image of Winston Churchill is of the jowly man in his late 60s who led England through World War II as its prime minister. I'd heard something about his youth being an interesting one, but I didn't know why.
Thanks to Candice Millard's Hero of the Empire—the Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill, I now do.
I rarely read history books but this one reads like the adventure story it is. Its subtitle explains its topic well. I'd known little about the Boer War before and couldn't have told you who the Boers were before reading this. In its epilogue, the book gives a quick history of South Africa from 1900 to today that's as clear as any I've seen.
But most of all, it fleshes out Churchill's youth. While my old image of him was of a man …
If you're like me, your primary image of Winston Churchill is of the jowly man in his late 60s who led England through World War II as its prime minister. I'd heard something about his youth being an interesting one, but I didn't know why.
Thanks to Candice Millard's Hero of the Empire—the Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill, I now do.
I rarely read history books but this one reads like the adventure story it is. Its subtitle explains its topic well. I'd known little about the Boer War before and couldn't have told you who the Boers were before reading this. In its epilogue, the book gives a quick history of South Africa from 1900 to today that's as clear as any I've seen.
But most of all, it fleshes out Churchill's youth. While my old image of him was of a man who led his nation while sitting in an armchair smoking a cigar, by December of 1899 the 25-year-old Winston Churchill "had felt bullets whistling by his head in Cuba, seen friends hacked to death in British India, been separated from his regiment in the deserts of the Sudan and, just a month earlier, in November 1899, at the start of the Boer War, let the resistance against a devastating attack on an armored train."
And his greatest adventure lay ahead.
