Help us choose the June 2014 selection to read for the MR Literary Club! The poll will be open for three days.
The vote is multiple choice. You may vote for as many or as few as you like.
The rotating nominator (this month - issybird) may not vote in the poll.
A discussion thread will begin shortly after a winner is chosen.
In the event of a tie, there will be a one-day non-multiple-choice run-off poll (where the rotating nominator again may note vote). In the event that the run-off poll also ends in a tie, the tie will be resolved by the rotating nominator.
Select from the following works:
Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One by Kate Adie
Spoiler:
A chronicle of the ways in which women's lives changed during World War I and what the impact has been for women today, 100 years later. This book details how when World War I broke out and a generation of men went off to fight, women emerged from the shadows of their domestic lives. They began to take up essential roles, from transport to policing, munitions to sports, entertainment, even politics. They had finally become citizens, a recognized part of the war machine, acquiring their own rights and often an independent income. Charting the seismic move toward equal rights with men that began a century ago, this book asks what these women achieved for future generations. Full of original research and archival material, it brings the remarkable stories of women's experiences from domestic service to the industrial workplace, the hospital, the land, politics, and the aristocracy to life.
A Diary without Dates by Enid Bagnold
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
A Nurse at the Front: The First World War Diaries of Sister Edith Appleton, Ruth Cowen (ed.)
The Roses of No-Man’s Land by Lyn Macdonald
Spoiler:
'On the face of it,' writes Lyn Macdonald, 'no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawing rooms into the manifest horrors of the First World War ...'
Yet the volunteer nurses rose magnificently to the occasion. In leaking tents and draughty huts they fought another war, a war against agony and death, as men lay suffering from the pain of unimaginable wounds or diseases we can now cure almost instantly. It was here that young doctors frantically forged new medical techniques - of blood transfusion, dentistry, psychiatry and plastic surgery - in the attempt to save soldiers shattered in body or spirit. And it was here that women achieved a quiet but permanent revolution, by proving beyond question they could do anything. All this is superbly captured in The Roses of No Man's Land, a panorama of hardship, disillusion and despair, yet also of endurance and supreme courage.
We That Were Young by Irene Rathbone
Home Fires Burning: The Great War Diaries of Georgina Lee, 1914-1919, Gavin Roynon (ed.)
Not So Quiet… by Helen Zenna Smith (pseudonym of Australian Evadne Price)