Mirrors of Greatness
Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A "fresh, fast-paced, and bracing" (Wall Street Journal) new biography of Winston Churchill, revealing how his relationships with the other great figures of his age shaped his own triumphs and failures as a leader
Winston Churchill remains one of the most revered figures of the twentieth century, his name a byword for courageous leadership. But the Churchill we know today is a mixture of history and myth, authored by the man himself. In Mirrors of Greatness, prizewinning historian David Reynolds reevaluates Churchill’s life by viewing it through the eyes of his allies and adversaries, even his own family, revealing Churchill’s lifelong struggle to overcome his political failures and his evolving grasp of what “greatness” truly entailed.
Through his dealings with Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, we follow Churchill’s triumphant campaign against Nazi Germany. But we also see a Churchill whose misjudgments of allies and rivals like Roosevelt, Stalin, Gandhi, and Clement Attlee blinded him to the British Empire’s waning dominance on the world stage and to the rising popularity of a postimperial, socialist vision of Great Britain at home.
Magisterial and incisive, Mirrors of Greatness affords Churchill his due as a figure of world-historical importance and deepens our understanding of his legend by uncovering the ways his greatest contemporaries helped make him the man he was, for good and for ill.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Reynolds (Island Stories) doesn't quite find a fresh angle on the much-studied British prime minister in this energetic if familiar study of "how Churchill learned from others as he rose to national and global prominence." Reynolds begins with profiles of his subject's mentors, including Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, whose political tactics Churchill adopted early in his career, and prime minister David Lloyd George, who taught Churchill "the language of Radicalism." Reynolds then moves on to Churchill's contemporaries during WWII, including his predecessor as prime minister, Neville Chamberlain; allied leaders Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin; and Charles de Gaulle, who Reynolds contends was very similar to Churchill, arguing that both saw themselves as the embodiment of their country's core identities. There are chapters on Churchill's political foes—Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mohandas Gandhi, and Churchill's successor Clement Attlee, who leveraged a productive partnership during the war into a postwar ouster—and his wife Clementine, who supported her husband's ambitions. Throughout, the analysis of how Churchill was influenced by his mentors, peers, and foes is lightly done. (Reynolds's conclusion that one of Churchill's "greatest achievements" was learning "the arts of improvisation," is a well-observed character assessment, though it appears to be more of an innate talent than something developed in dialogue with others.) This one's best suited to Churchill completists.
