London's Burning: Life, Death, and Art in the Second World War

Sculptor Henry Moore, composer Benjamin Britten and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings are the focus of this absorbing, vivid study on how British artists responded to the exigencies of WW II. Moore, in his drawings of underground shelters in London's subways during the Blitz, captured the humanity of ordinary people. His sculpture Madonna and Child (1943-1944) is ``a statement of the values for which the war was professedly being fought,'' assert Stansky, a Stanford history professor, and Abrahams, an editor who has his own imprint at Dutton. They apply the same formulation to Britten's opera Peter Grimes (1945), interpreted here as a statement about the preservation of individual rights and tolerance of nonconformity. Fires Were Started (1942), Jennings's documentary film portraying a day in the life of a fire-fighting squad, celebrates the quiet heroism of civilians resisting German bombings. The authors, who collaborated on The Unknown Orwell , are also interesting and informative in discussing painter Graham Sutherland's bombscapes and Paul Nash's Totes Meer , an allegorical painting symbolizing the defeat of Germany's aerial invasion. Illustrated. (July)