It was the year of Amelia Earhart's disappearance, the destruction
of Guernica from the air, the New London School Explosion, and the
Hindenburg disaster. The Ohio River and the Lower Mississippi
flooded. The recovery of 1936 plummeted into the Recession of 1937
- 1938. Churchill was in the political wilderness; FDR thwarted
himself by overreach, raising a bipartisan conservative coalition
against him in Congress; Stanley Baldwin left Downing Street in
favour of his chosen successor, Neville Chamberlain. The duke of
Windsor married Mrs Simpson; the coronation went ahead, with a
different monarch: George 6th. Stalin carried on with purge and
show-trial. Japan renewed hostilities in China. Italy committed
genocide and war crimes in Abyssinia; the Third Reich continued its
blind career towards destruction. Dowding and Pile were determining
that - whatever Baldwin had said - the bomber should not, actually,
always get through: not through ack-ack, not through fighter
screens, and above all not through radar. George C Marshall was
keeping an eye on rising stars: Ike; Patton; Bradley. Sam Rayburn
was Majority Leader of the House; Lyndon Johnson entered Congress;
Harry S Truman was midway through his first, undistinguished Senate
term. Bohr and Teller were looking into arcane mysteries; Hayek and
Coase were making sense of the economic shambles; Wittgenstein
threw away all his previous conclusions and began afresh, wrestling
with language and meaning. Eliot was hearing the first premonitory
whispers of four quartets in scansion, beyond Burnt Norton; Auden,
the echoes of the Viking sagas. The future and the past were
interpenetrate: time present and time past.... Men sought the
mastery of Nature, from the flooded Ohio to the new Golden Gate
Bridge, and courted the Nemesis that on bold hubris waits; others
quested after authenticity. By the end of the year, Walt Disney had
recreated an old story as the first feature-length animated film:
that of Snow White; Carl Orff had rescued old tavern songs of
Fortune's Wheel; and an obscure Oxford philologist had made new
myth, from a hole in the ground where dwelt a hobbit. 1937 was a
year of portent. Now its story is told, by the authors of the
celebrated centenary history of the US and UK Titanic Enquiries,
hailed by the "Daily Telegraph"'s James Delingpole as a 'cool
reassessment' and by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris contributing
correspondent of the "Sunday Telegraph, " as ' a] sharply and
eruditely-drawn account.... A] vivid reconstruction and analysis
... a parliamentary procedural as well as the re-creation of a
vanished pre-War world'. Markham Shaw Pyle is the historian of how,
in 1941, four scant months before Pearl Harbor, the US Congress
kept the draft - by one vote; GMW Wemyss, the chronicler of those
three days in May 1940 during which Chamberlain was toppled and
Churchill raised to the premiership just as Hitler began his
invasion of France. In this sweeping history of a portentous year,
they once more range from intellectual history to the fields of
battle, from flooded farms to the halls of Congress and the Palace
of Westminster, illuminating great and little alike. This is at
once history in the grand manner, and history from the ground up:
from nuts and bolts and poets' insights, to secret diplomacy, the
mysteries of physics, the warfare in the human heart, and moments
of high tragedy and unconquered hope.
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