May be total bunk, but perfectly entertaining

So my caveats are:

This is pop history and all its trappings are possible and present within this.

I don’t know almost anything about the Boer War going in so I can’t challenge anything.

I listened to the audiobook, so any reference material used was not directly cited.

 

But I found this very entertaining. It’s about Winston Churchill’s Boer War experiences first as a combatant and then as a war reporter who is captured and then escapes, and then spends a bunch of time in South African desert/savanna behind enemy lines and trying to get back to safety.

I am sure this book is full of propaganda, even though it’s not the most Imperialistic book I have ever read, but like the Nazis, the Boers are a pretty easy target since they would beget South African apartheid and fought against British anti-slavery laws. But for the most part the book tries to be moderately sympathetic to them, casting them as adversaries but not evil enemies throughout this.

So here’s some things I DID learn. I knew that Winston Churchill won the Nobel Peace Prize and that he also won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I didn’t realize he had a long career as a writer in conjunction with being a politician and soldier. I thought instead that he was more so a writer in his waning years.

Also, did you know that the movie Vice Versa, ie the body switch movie starring Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold where they both touch an exotic totemic thingy and switch bodies is based on a British novel from the 1880s??

I know there’s been lots of body switch movies, but that one was called “Vice Versa” and so was the book.

Crazy, right?