Freedom at Midnight
Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre
In 1947, the British empire, still devastated from its epic struggle against Hitler’s Germany, began the unprecedented process of a global empire self-dismantling. The Indian subcontinent, and its partition into the modern nations of India and Pakistan, was the first and greatest jewel pried from the British crown; and its loss was not without equal measures heroism and villainy, tragedy and triumph.
Having read the authors’s previous works “Is Paris Burning?” and “O Jerusalem,” this was a natural pickup. The authors are skilled at teasing out the human element in great movements, and at painting the broad themes of history in small brushstrokes of personal recollections. “Freedom at Midnight” is no exception, even when the narrative thread (for me) got lost at times in the multiplying thicket of individual tales of savagery and horror from the Punjabi massacres. Even then, the oral histories collected and retained in this volume are invaluable artifacts of a unique time in human history, when both the brutality and the nobility of human nature found expression in a transition of power unrivaled in the annals of history.
Authors: Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre
Genres: Nonfiction, History, Indian History
Tags: Pakistani History, British History