Sunday, January 16, 2011

Book Review: His Finest Hour: A Biography of Winston Churchill


I personally think this book is poorly written. This book needs some good editing. It's not a good biography. The writing is incoherent. The accounts about Winston Churchill are very scattered, very loosely put together. They seem to be all based on sporadic quotes extracted by the author from other people's books on Churchill. I had never read any biography on Winston Churchill before reading this book. In fact, I didn't know much about this legend except what I heard occasionally from the History Channel when I was flipping through. I'm sure there must be a lot of interesting books out there about Churchill, and this book just makes me wonder what the author's motives were when he was writing "His Finest Hours". Honestly I don't see the point of the book. I don't know what the author was trying to do. If he was trying to introduce Chruchill to people like me, who knows nothing about him except his great quote, "This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end....", I have to say the book is very dull (due to the mumbling tone, as if someone is mumbling a lot of things here and there, jumping here and there) , and it fails to retain my interest in learning more about Chruchill. It also fails to arouse my curiosity about this great historical figure, whose life, I'm sure, was not only extremely exciting, but interesting and fascinating. If the author's goal was to shed a new light on Winston Churchill, to bring in new facts on the man, he failed to be assertive. There is just a lack of primary research or investigation done by the author's part to allow him to express his opinions or present his analysis (if there is any...and I don't see there is really much analysis except re-cyling materials he read) in any assertive or authoritative way. The book made me feel like even the author himself was lost. It's as if he wasn't sure what he really wanted to write about during the course of writing the book. The author's words were jumping here and there, mumbing about Churchill. Was he trying to prove some new facts, to share his opinions, to debate some facts? If so, he is a bore, both his point of view and his position are too blurry, and unassured.

1 comment:

christa @ mental foodie said...

Husband and I were just talking about Winston Churchill yesterday, and prompted me to see what books are written about him (fiction or non-fiction). Guess I'll avoid this one! Thanks for the review.

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