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Austerity Britain: Smoke in the Valley (Tales of a New Jerusalem 2) | 
 enlarge | Author: David Kynaston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £2.69
You Save: £5.30 (66%)
New (22) Used (2) from £2.69
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 2372
Media: Paperback
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0747592284
EAN: 9780747592280
ASIN: 0747592284
Publication Date: July 7, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Revisionist Nostalgia July 23, 2008
There are few history books which manage to be hugely readable, informative, and thought-provoking at the same time, but David Kynaston has achieved the alchemy brilliantly with this volume. What Peter Hennessey did for political history Kynaston does for social history creating a narrative that is as compelling as it is revealing. The principal sources used here are the Mass Observation Panels, private diaries, and opinion polls painting a picture of Britain which is rounded, convincing, and frequently startling. In understated and beautifully written prose the author goes about demolishing many of the preconceptions that tend to be associated with the period: for instance that the British public were full of idealism and political commitment in welcoming Labour's nationalisation and welfare state programmes or that the deprivations of rationing or devaluation were met with uncomplaining stoicism. What emerges in this work and the companion volume is that the Britons of the 1940's were much closer to their countryman of sixty years later not least in their demand for material comfort, political apathy, obsession with class and unwillingness to embrace change.
The most powerful theme which emerges here as is Hennessey's work is the ludicrous belief in Britain's ability to remain a world and colonial power and the enormous complacency that it bred, ensuring British industry failed to grasp the fleeting opportunity to break into new markets, cut military spending or adopt sensible exchange rates. If you are looking for the root of many our present day problems you could do worse than start here. Yet don't think this is in anyway a dry account heavy on interpretation-nostalgia lovers will find plenty to get their teeth into here as will those who like cultural or sporting snippets: Denis Compton, Stanley Matthews, Frankie Howerd, Tommy Handley, Bruce Woodcock and Dirk Bogarde are to be found in these pages which deserve that rarest of things: an unqualified recommendation to all.
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