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About Churchill and America

In this stirring book, Martin Gilbert tells the intensely human story of Winston Churchill's profound connection to America, a relationship that resulted in an Anglo-American alliance that has stood at the center of international relations for more than a century. Winston Churchill, whose mother, Jennie Jerome, the daughter of a leading American entrepreneur, was born in Brooklyn in 1854, spent much of his seventy adult years in close contact with the United States. In two world wars, his was the main British voice urging the closest possible cooperation with the United States. From before the First World War, he understood the power of the United States, the "gigantic boiler," which, once lit, would drive the great engine forward. Sir Martin Gilbert was appointed Churchill's official biographer in 1968 and has ever since been collecting archival and personal documentation that explores every twist and turn of Churchill's relationship with the United States, revealing the golden thread running through it of friendship and understanding despite many setbacks and disappointments. Drawing on this extensive store of Churchill's own words — in his private letters, his articles and speeches, and press conferences and interviews given to American journalists on his numerous journeys throughout the United States — Gilbert paints a rich portrait of the Anglo-American relationship that began at the turn of the last century. In Churchill and America, Gilbert explores how Churchill's intense rapport with this country resulted in no less than the liberation of Europe and the preservation of European democracy and freedom. It also set the stage for the ongoing alliance that has survived into the twenty-first century. "This is a fascinating story, straightforward and well told, of one of the 20th century's most important leaders and the critical connection he forged between the world's fading superpower and its rising one."— Publishers Weekly "It is doubtful whether anyone on this planet knows more about the life and times of Winston Churchill than his official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert."— Library Journal