The Great Silence
Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This account of British life in the wake of World War I is "social history at its very best . . . insightful and utterly absorbing" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
As the euphoria of Armistice Day in 1918 quickly subsided, there was no denying the carnage that the Great War had left in its wake. Grief and shock overwhelmed the psyche of the British people—but from their despair, new life would slowly emerge.
For veterans with faces demolished in the trenches, surgeon Harold Gillies brings hope with his miraculous skin-grafting procedure. Women win the vote, skirt hems leap, and Brits forget their troubles at packed dance halls. And two years later, the remains of a nameless combatant would be laid to rest in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey, as "The Great Silence," observed in memory of the countless dead, halted citizens in silent reverence.
This history of two transformative years in the life of a nation features countless characters, from an aging butler to a pair of newlyweds, from the Prince of Wales to T. E. Lawrence, the real-life Lawrence of Arabia. The Great Silence depicts a nation fighting the forces that threaten to tear it apart and discovering the common bonds that hold it together.
"A pearl of anecdotal history, The Great Silence is a satisfying companion to major studies of World War I and its aftermath . . . as Nicolson proceeds through the familiar stages of grief—denial, anger and acceptance—she gives you a deeper understanding of not only this brief period, but also how war's sacrifices don't end after the fighting stops." —The Seattle Times
"It may make you cry." —The Boston Globe
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Queen Mary s diary and the recollections of an under-chauffeur to the Portuguese ambassador are two of the disparate sources Nicholson (The Perfect Summer) uses in her anecdotal account of the period between the end of WWI on November 11, 1918, and the burial of an unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey two years later. Vividly portraying the horrors of trench warfare and the misery of the bereaved and wounded, she uses the metaphor of the great silence two minutes of stillness commemorating the armistice to explore Britons attempts to cope with the growing despair generated by broken promises and false hopes. Industrial unrest, advances in women s rights, increasing drug use, and the new craze of jazz reveal, says Nicolson, the clamor of the nation s progress through grief. Her sometimes affecting pastiche of Britain s post-WWI mood is marred by the absence of source notes, disconnected vignettes, and minor inaccuracies, such as the origins of the word barmy (which relates to beer s froth, not to the Barming Hospital at Maidstone) and the postwar fashion for men s wristwatches. 37 b&w photos.
