Review: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

If you have read Erik Larson before, you will love this book as well. It follows Churchill with his family and his friends in the first year of WWII. He was really quite a character! Wearing colorful silk robes and drinking whiskey all day did not keep Churchill from making grand decisions that affected our world.

Jeez Mom, that's it?! All of Erik Larson's books are 5s for us, and this was no different. It was long and dense, but don't let that fool you. Churchill was nuts, and England would 100 percent be speaking German if not for him (and the Americans, of course). Just like the rest of his books, it's peppered with astounding quotes and tidbits of information you wouldn't otherwise pick-up from history books.

His scrupulously researched tomes, this one in particular, are derived from epistolary sources--that is, letters to and from 'characters' in the book. Reading this saddened me as I realized that these sources are going to fizzle and die out in the next several years! So much that's written in our past history are from sources like this, and now what? Will books written about the pandemic and the shitty 45th president a century from now (if our planet isn't a fireball by then...) be sourced from tweets and TikToks? I hope not. I'm going to write a letter to Barb now.

Rating: 5

Get it on Bookshop and check out our Word of the Week post featuring all words from The Splendid and the Vile!