Book Review

Last Hope Island, by historian Lynne Olson, is a moving and informative book that takes the reader, by way of personal stories, deeply into the heights and depths of Europe as it slid towards, suffered through, and struggled to recover from, World War II.

Many histories of major events tend to follow a similar road - attempting to take the reader on a linear journey along the  time line that runs from an arbitrary beginning through to some official end.  Olson doesn't obscure those moments, but cuts away the often confusing morass of "facts and figures" by showing us the involvment of individuals, as well as of various groups.

Many of these individuals - their actions, behaviour, and personal qualities, good and bad - will come as a surprise to even the best read devotee of this part of recent human history.  Likewise the involvement of many national groups - politicians, military personnel, and civilians - who recognised the need to escape and resist Nazi control, and for various reasons, ended up in Britain.  Many arrived during those darkest of days, during and after Dunkirk, though there was also a remarkable exodus of Poles and Czechs who managed to reach Britain before the invasion of France, Belgium, and Holland, and who went on to do great things in the what looked like being Britain's last stand.

I won't spoil the surprises to be found in this book other than to say that the tales that Olson relates will offer you great insights into acts of heroism, brilliance, tragedy, triumph, cowardice, and bungling that are rarely remembered nowadays - and into the reasons the world took the shape that it did in the second half of the twentieth century.

Many of those acts have slipped from the official histories -  sometimes for good reason, and sometimes to protect people in high places.  You will find in these pages some names that will suprise you, and you may gain a fresh understanding of  the lives and actions of those people over the decades after the war ended - though there are some who wonder if that war did end in 1945.

The book also shows just how sadly history does repeat itself, and I wonder if you, as I did, will find at many points some very poignant and disturbing parallels with the world we are living in today.

Many people and peoples were betrayed - before, during, and after the war - for reasons that were later glossed over as "matters of state" or "grand principle" but were, at the time, decisions made on the basis of prejudice, personal ambition, or personal ignorance.  Olson's writings cannot but help to make us wonder just how many of our current leaders are acting the same way.

Look closely and you will find more than one "war hero" who is famed for some action that shortened the war and saved many lives, who at some other time made a decision that had the opposite effect.

No single book could possibly encompass the entirety of a period like World War II, but Olson, in this book, has cut to the heart of some of the most crucial, world-shaping moments of that time, and has done so in an eminently readable fashion.