Customer Reviews

Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady

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This delightfully intimate chronicle of Margaret Thatcher's assault on British socialism reminds us Americans that free-market principles are superior to collectivist schemes. Author John Blundell, a loyal Brit with an unabashed love of America, heads IEA, Britain's foremost liberty-oriented think-tank. His book presents crucial lessons to guide contemporary American economic and defense policy-makers.

A refreshing antidote to Nock's Our Enemy, the State is John Blundell`s Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008). For a time, as Prime Minister of Great Britain, Thatcher not only retarded the progress of statism but reversed its course. There certainly was nothing fatalistic in her or in her political career, and everything inspiring and encouraging. Blundell, director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, has known Thatcher since 1970 and has written a personal portrait of her ("a very personal interpretation of a very special life"), as opposed to an exhaustive biography and scholarly analysis of her life and politics. (He provides two pages of "further reading" on Thatcher at the end of his biography, listing books, essays, and articles.)

"There is no such thing as Society," she once remarked. "There are only individual men and women and there are families." Nock would have agreed with her, but while he condemned most individuals for harboring what he called an "invincible ignorance," Thatcher was certain that most people would listen to clear reason when their liberty was at stake.

But, as a refutation of Albert Jay Nock's fatalism, not to mention of the doctrinaire collectivism of various schools, John Blundell's compact biography of Margaret Thatcher demonstrates how a nation can, for a time at least, reclaim itself from its past follies, and give those in it who champion a moral basis of capitalism time to marshal their courage, arguments and numbers.

200 odd pages to cover Margaret Thatcher's life from childhood to retirement, with additional chapters on her family and the key people surrounding. John Blundell has simmered all this down to 26 chapters, framing the life story with a depiction of the UK socio-economic and political context and its relationship with the US. Not only did Mr. Blundell write an easy-to-read and brief biography, he created a love declaration, which nearly relegates this book to glossy marketing material. Nearly.

The book was written in an important time in the Western world: Margaret Thatcher's assessment and follow-through of changes that needed to take place was very astute. She showed great courage in attacking said problems. I consider her a hero and recommend the book to any one interested in history.

I'm fairly certain the cover of this book was a bad photoshop job. Writing is okay, nothing to write home about.
Not worth the price though.