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From the Newsletter- April 2005 |
BOOK REVIEWS
BRISTOL UNDER SEIGE: Surviving the Wartime Blitz HELEN REID 128pp Redcliffe Press
ISBN 1 904537 25 1 £8.95
World War Two never goes away as a subject, and it has been more in the news this year, as sixtieth anniversaries of events in 1945 come around. This reviewer is rather inclined to turn the page when the Evening Post runs yet another WWII memories column, but this book merits attention.
A history of any aspect of the Second World War needs to consider its audience. There are very few people now who fought in the War, and others for whom it is only a childhood memory. But the ‘baby-boomers’ now in their fifties, while they have no direct experience of the War, were brought up to share in the folk-memory. Only now is it becoming possible to write a history of the times as ‘history’ - in the same way that an author might approach the Napoleonic wars, or the Wars of the Roses.
Helen Reid’s book is a judicious mixture of ‘straight’ history and first-person memories, superbly illustrated with well-chosen and striking images. There’s no undue nostalgia or flag-waving, and there are disinterested accounts of the unpreparedness and mis-management which led to wavering morale on occasion. It’s not a detailed analytical work, and it should be read by anyone in their twenties or thirties for whom the Bristol Blitz is ancient - and irrelevant - history.
VARIOUS TITLES Bristol Branch of the Historical Association
The production line has continued to roll for this excellent series of publications, which must come with the caveat that your reviewer did the typesetting. Bristol 1934-1939 by John Lyes (36pp, £3.00) is the last in this mini-series in which the author continued the tradition started by Latimer’s famous Annals of recording history as it happened. Bristol and the Wars of the Roses, 1451-1471 by Peter Fleming (32pp, £3.00) is a clear and well written account of a confusing period in Bristol’s history. Early Bristol Quakerism: The Society of Friends in the City 1654-1700 by Russell Mortimer (28pp, £3.00) is a reprint of a book first published in 1967 and now updated and reissued to mark the tercentenary of the Quakers in Bristol. Finally, still quite warm off the presses, we have The 1832 Cholera Epidemic and its Impact on the City of Bristol by Sue Hardiman (28pp, £2.50) which shows the terrifying effect this disease had when its causes and cure were a matter of speculation and superstition.
ANDRÉ COUTANCHE
0117 964 3106
email: andrec@andrec.plus.com
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