The Churchill Factor

October 15, 2014
London mayor Johnson (Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World, 2012, etc.) takes a look at the quintessential British leader and his massively widespread influence on global affairs. The author studies how this one incredible man played some role in every war from the Boer War to the Cold War. Young Churchill was effectively ignored by his aristocratic father and received little attention from his American-born mother. Nonetheless, he developed an incredible ego and belief in his own prowess. Of course, he wasn't actually perfect and made plenty of mistakes, many of which Johnson covers in a delightful chapter called "Winston Churchill and the Art of Surviving the Cataclysmic Cock-Up." The author attempts to explore the personality of Churchill and how he reacted to situations. Though his drinking was legion, Johnson points out that, on the other hand, Hitler was a teetotaler, "a deformity that accounts for much misery." Churchill possessed a gambler's temperament, fearing no risk, and he was also a weathervane for political thought. From his father, who was unrepentantly disloyal, he inherited his disdain of party loyalty, and he made it his life's work to make his name one of the most significant in political and diplomatic history. In his dealings with Hitler, Johnson refers to him as "the crowbar of destiny," since "[i]f he hadn't...put up resistance, that Nazi train would have carried right on." As the author demonstrates, Churchill still affects us all, from the makeup of the Middle East (he coined the phrase) to the Cold War and the European Union-not to mention the prodigious amount of writing he left behind. Despite the author's drifts into hagiography and occasionally contrived prose ("his dentition was assisted by artifice"), reading about Churchill is always a delight, and Johnson is an accomplished, accessible writer.

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October 15, 2014

While there are many accounts of Winston Churchill and his political savvy, one would be remiss to ignore this sprightly written volume by Johnson, whose day job is serving as mayor of London. Johnson's purpose in retelling Churchill's story is quite simple: he believes that the portly, cigar smoking, whiskey imbibing politician was, without doubt, the greatest British statesman in history. He further contends that we can learn much from examining how Churchill defended the British Empire, defeated Adolf Hitler's intimidating forces, and confronted the rise of communism--all in the name of representative government in the modern age. The author surveys Churchill's life (1874-1965) from beginning to end in a style that uses descriptive and occasionally unexpected words to portray the politician's business arrangements and entry into World War II. (For example, he employs the terms vaginal, cervix, uterus, and phallus to describe the Gallipoli Campaign, one of the Allies' greatest failures.) VERDICT Johnson's history of Churchill is well crafted, amply researched, and a pleasure to read. It can serve as a change of pace from more plodding accounts. [See Prepub Alert, 6/2/14.]--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

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