Days That Shook the World

Title: Days That Shook the World

Author: Davenport, Hugo

ISBN: 9780563487838

Binding:

Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Publication Date: 2003-10-02

Number of Pages: 240

Weight: 1.1615 kg

Benefiting from its tie-in to a high- profile BBC2 series, this is history at its mostly lively. Each lavishly illustrated chapter includes two key moments that shaped events. Hence, the opening chapter on atomic power zeroes in on the day the bomb destroyed Hiroshima and the Chernobyl meltdown. The rise and fall of communism are highlighted by the Romanov assassinations and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Davenport's background as a history journalist enables him to reduce complex threads to simple, sparky sentences. His text on the monarchy concludes that, for all the Queen's efforts to promote its continuing value, many of her descendants still trail a whiff of her abdicated uncle Edward VIII's faint but unmistakable air of futility .