Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, A Daring Escape and The Making of Winston Churchill.
MILLARD, Candice.
Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, A Daring Escape and The Making of Winston Churchill.
“Although Churchill had been called many things—opportunist, braggart, blowhard—no one had ever questioned his bravery": First Edition of Hero of the Empire; Signed by Candice Millard
New York: Doubleday, 2016.
$150.00
In Stock
Item Number: 152133
First edition of this New York Times bestselling narrative history recounting the twenty-four-year-old Winston Churchill’s capture by Boer forces during the South African War of 1899. Octavo, original publisher’s half-cloth, cartographic endpapers, illustrated with black-and-white photographs. Boldly signed by Candice Millard. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by John Fontana.
Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, A Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill (2016) is the third book by Candice Millard, a former writer and editor for National Geographic magazine and one of the most accomplished practitioners of narrative popular history working in America today, whose previous titles The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic had already established her as a New York Times bestselling author of considerable distinction. The book focuses on a single extraordinary episode in the early life of Winston Churchill: his arrival in South Africa in 1899 at the age of twenty-four as a war correspondent covering the Boer War, his capture by Boer forces following the destruction of an armored train in which he played a prominent role, and his daring solo escape across hundreds of miles of enemy territory that transformed him into a national hero and effectively launched the political career that would culminate four decades later in his wartime premiership. Millard spins an epic story of bravery, savagery, and chance encounters with a cast of historical characters including Rudyard Kipling, Lord Kitchener, and Mohandas Gandhi, with whom Churchill would later share the world stage, making the compelling case that the lessons Churchill took from the Boer War would profoundly affect twentieth-century history. The book was an Indie Next pick, a top ten critics pick by the New York Times, and was named Amazon's number one history book of 2016, with the New York Times calling it a nail-biter and top-notch character study rolled into one, and Piers Brendon of Churchill College, Cambridge, praising it as essential to a better understanding of Churchill's life and personality. It also won the 2017 Kansas Notable Book Award and has been translated into Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean
