Greatest Day in History - Softcover

Nicholas Best grew up in Kenya and was educated there, in England and at Trinity College, Dublin. He served on a short service commission in the Grenadier Guards and spent a year at Harvard before becoming a fulltime writer. He has written novels, travel and history books, and has seen his work translated into several foreign languages and serialised on Radio 4. He was FT fiction critic during the 1990s and has reviewed for many publications. He lives in the academic community in Cambridge.

Historian and novelist Best, former fiction critic for the Financial Times, offers a sophisticated presentation of the effects of the Great War's final week on its military and civilian participants. Day by day, he presents firsthand accounts from a spectrum of familiar and unfamiliar sources. On November 5, 1918, Scots Guards Pvt. Stephen Graham took part in an attack with an elite British division, while American artillery Capt. Harry Truman picked flowers to send his fiancée and contemplated running for Congress when—and if—he got home. On November 8, Evelyn Blücher, an Englishwoman married to a German prince, feared an outbreak of riots or revolution in Germany. And on November 11, Armistice Day, a crowd of Australians celebrated by storming Boulogne's red light district to the battle cry of let's fuck 'em free! What might have been merely a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes is given shape and focus by Best's skill at paraphrasing the narratives and synergizing the experiences of those who lived through the greatest day in history, knowing they had survived the deadliest war up to then—and suddenly asking, What happens now? 16 pages of b&w photos. (Nov.)
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