WINSTON CHURCHILL IN THE BOER WAR. CHURCHILL WANTED DEAD OR IN SOUTH AFRICA

1999. Soft cover; 233 pages. Very good condition. Under 1kg.   In this stirring biography of a brash, resourceful Churchill in his early twenties, Celia Sandys retraces her illustrious grandfather's path through South Africa as she reconstructs his adventures during nine months of the Anglo-Boer War at the end of the last century. She visits the campsites where the bold war correspondent and ready soldier bivouacked, the battlefields where he skirmished and fought, the site of his incarceration in Pretoria as the Boers' prisoner of war; she follows the route of his daring escape to the Mozambique border. Using both British and South African sources, which alternately reveal the young combatant as a courageous ally or formidable foe, Sandys narrates the heart-stopping exploits of a Churchill that history has largely forgotten. Yet his heroics in Africa thrust him to fame on the international stage, and within three months of his return to England, at the age of twenty-five, Churchill became a member of Parliament. Churchill: Wanted Dead or Alive offers both a multifaceted portrait of the youthful adventurer who would become England's legendary prime minister and an exciting tale of the turbulent events one hundred years ago that defined South Africa for modern times.