Description
THE GREAT ESCAPE is a movie about men escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp in World War II. The Great Escape of this book is the story of mankind’s escaping from deprivation and early death, of how people have managed to make their lives better, and led the way for others to follow.
One of those lives was my father’s. Leslie Harold Deaton was born in 1918 in a tough coal-mining village called Thurcroft in the South Yorkshire coalfield. His grandparents Alice and Thomas had given up agricultural labor in the hope of doing better in the new mine. Their eldest son, my grandfather Harold, fought in World War I, returned to the “pit,” and eventually became a supervisor. For my father, it was difficult to become educated in Thurcroft between the wars because only a few children were allowed to go to high school. Leslie took odd jobs at the pit; like the other boys, his ambition was that, one day, he would get the chance to work at the face. He never made it; he was drafted into the army in 1939 and sent to France as part of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force. After that debacle, he was sent to Scotland to be trained to be a commando; there he met my mother and was “fortunate” enough to be invalided out of the army with tuberculosis and sent to a sanitarium. Fortunate because the commando raid on Norway was a failure, and he would almost certainly have died. He was demobilized in 1942 and married my mother, Lily Wood, the daughter of a carpenter in the town of Galashiels in the south of Scotland.
Although deprived of a high school education in Yorkshire, Leslie had gone to night school to learn surveying skills that were useful in mining, and in 1942, with labor in short supply, those skills made him an attractive hire as an office boy in a firm of civil engineers in Edinburgh. He determined to become a civil engineer himself, and, starting from a base of almost nothing, he put in a decade of hard work and finally qualified. The courses were a great struggle, especially mathematics and physics; the night school he attended, now the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, recently sent me his examination results, and struggle he certainly did. He took a job as a water supply engineer in the Borders of Scotland and bought the cottage where my mother’s grandmother had lived, and where in earlier days Sir Walter Scott was said to have been an occasional visitor. For me, moving from Edinburgh—with its grime, soot, and miserable weather—to a country village—with its woods, hills, and trout streams and, in the summer of 1955, endless sunshine—was a great escape of its own.
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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: What This Book Is About 1
1 The Wellbeing of the World 23
PART I LIFE AND DEATH
2 From Prehistory to 1945 59
3 Escaping Death in the Tropics 101
4 Health in the Modern World 126
PART II MONEY
5 Material Wellbeing in the United States 167
6 Globalization and the Greatest Escape 218
PART III HELP
7 How to Help Those Left Behind 267
Postscript: What Comes Next? 325
Notes 331
Index 351