Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was a perspective I’d never made a connection between. While Orwell has always been one of my favorite authors (fiction and non-fiction), Churchill has never been that endearing to me as a person or as a politician.
This book helped me see that both Orwell and Churchill were on the same team in decrying the moral evils and corruption that enabled the dictatorships of the 1930’s to take hold in Europe and Asia, and eventually led to World War II.
Churchill and Orwell, although they came from different British classes, had childhoods that were remarkably similar. They both had absent fathers and distracted mothers, which led to a penchant for solitude, although they both wanted families (and had them eventually). That solitude gave them time to observe, to think, and to create discussions and conversations and speeches that were astoundingly prescient and shocking (for the time).
I definitely recommend this book. It gives insights into both the author and the politician that show just how much they shared the same view of the extraordinary time they lived in.
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