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Title: The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm
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Manufacturer: Grove Press
List Price: $25.00
Our Price: $5.76
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| Customer Reviews: |
| The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Grove Press Disappointing and superficial | This is a book that simply doesn't work, much as its author knows about the period. She introduces historical "characters" as if we will be following some sort of narrative about them, then simply drops them after an extensive description and one or two anecdotes. The chronological arrangement would seem to promise that we are building towards a point somehow, but even the brewing conflict with Germany doesn't seem dramatic in Nicolson's hands.
I'll bet she would write really wonderful historical fiction, though, since she has such a feel for the times and characters, mores and hypocrisies. It's just that the format of this book limited her ability to focus on the parts that seemed to interest her most: the personalities and society of the era. | | The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Grove Press Awful | | This was one of my Book Club's suggestions and I ready it and didn't enjoy it at all. The author is a relative of some of the persons in the book, so there was a lot of "name dropping". I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. | | The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Grove Press Edwardian social history | Examination of the summer months of 1911, the Coronation Summer of King George V. The author's style can be somewhat plodding, and there a few noticable errors of fact. For example, Queen Mary's Aunt Augusta was nearly 89, not 85, in June of 1911. And I thought it was Harold Nicolson who owned the car nicknamed Green Archie, not Vita Sackville West? (Funny that a relative would make that error?)
Just two examples -- I don't want anyone to think I read the book looking for errors, but there are more than these.
The book is interesting yet somehow not very insightful. Despite a substantial biliography, the book gives an impression of being lightweight. Perhaps that's caused by its focus being somewhat more on the lives of the English aristocracy than on the lower classes.
I can say with all honesty, while I didn't dislike this book and in fact found some sections very interesting (such as, the cost of a funeral for a lower class English person, and the information about the strikes that occurred that summer) I am glad I borrowed a copy from the library rather than purchasing it. | | The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Grove Press Twilight of an Era | | I found this a fascinating book, extremely well-written and a sharply-focused peek into a bygone era. For history buffs it is especially valable as not only the breaking up of a world which was never more to be, but the mindsets of various segments of a society which was to be turned u.pside-down by a war that decimated a generation. I highly recommend it. | | The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Grove Press OK, but.... | | Not very 'deep'. Interesting, light, almost frivolous, view of 1911, and a good way to understand the differences and struggles of the various elements of post-Victorian society, but does not assess the year in the setting of post-Edwardian, and pre-WW I history, or the growing challenge of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany. R.K.Massey's "Dreadnought" or William Manchester's "The Last Lion" (Vol 2)do a better and deeper job of this. | | The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Grove Press Product Description | The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. Through the tight lens of four months, Juliet Nicolson’s rich storytelling gifts rivet us with the sights, colors, and feelings of a bygone era. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were showing. The country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes. Temperatures rose steadily to more than 100 degrees; by August deaths from heatstroke were too many for newspapers to report. Drawing on material from intimate and rarely seen sources and narrated through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals — among them a debutante, a choirboy, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler, and the Queen — The Perfect Summer is a vividly rendered glimpse of the twilight of the Edwardian era. |
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