Welcome to Litsy!

This is a brilliant, wide-ranging book, telling the forgotten (or deliberately airbrushed) story of the millions of colonial and non-white troops who served in World War One, the patronising and racist attitudes they encountered, and how the backlash against them fed into the ideology and rise of the Nazis in Germany and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan in the USA.

Went to bed at 1.45am. Awake again at 5.45am. Looking after a sick parent must be what having kids is like.

The lack of sleep is probably why I found this sentence so unfathomably funny.

Next up #blackhistorymonth2023

The book tells the stories of the forgotten soldiers of world war one, meaning the non-white men from around the world that were needed by the empires on both sides. They were badly needed, but always treated as 'lesser'. How the white governments worried they might get uppity, and how to keep them away from white women. It made my blood boil.
I found the book a bit disjointed, but that was probably due to my lack of knowledge about WWI.

Not in the Litsy list yet, so link to another title by same author. Goes with new BBC TV series.

A lot of my reading this year has been about 'forgetting' - people, events, viewpoints written out of mainstream narratives. This looks at the global story of Black British history - Roman settlements, Elizabethan sailors, slave trade, empire & industrial revolution, thro Enoch Powell to the 2012 Olympics.

Important and very readable so far.