The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy Book

I wanted to read this because I had really enjoyed the movie version and was curious how much of the events in the film had been fictionalized. Surprisingly, the movie was fairly accurate.

Mark Logue, who is the grandson of speech therapist Lionel Logue, used family scrapbooks, journals and letters to create this account of Lionel's experience helping the Duke of York (later known as King George VI) with his lifelong stammer. The two men became friends, which seemed to comfort the Duke as he tried to improve his public speaking skills.

Because the men worked together for so many years ' starting in 1926 and through World War II ' the book also highlights the history of England during that time, which was interesting. It is a nice complement to other books about the run-up to the war.

If you've seen the movie with Colin Firth, you know that it focuses more on the perspective of the Duke, nicknamed Bertie. The book has more background on Lionel and his family, including how they immigrated to England, which was interesting.

I listened to this on audio, narrated by Simon Vance, and it was good way to hear this story. The version I listened to also included a recording of the famous war speech by King George VII. I would recommend it to fellow history buffs.

Note
The subtitle of this book, How One Man Saved the British Monarchy, is a bit ridiculous. It is so hyperbolic that an editor or publisher must have come up with it in an effort to sell more books. As helpful as it was to have a good speech therapist for the king, would the English monarchy really have been destroyed if Logue hadn't been there?

Favorite Passage
"Even with the benefit of more than half a century's worth of hindsight, establishing quite how Logue succeeded with the King where those who preceded him had failed still remains something of a challenge. The various breathing exercises on which he put such emphasis certainly appear to have helped ' the King, for one, appears to have been convinced of that. Important, too, was the effort that Logue put into going through the texts of the various speeches that had been written for him, removing words and phrases that he knew could potentially trip up his royal pupil. In a sense, though, this was not so much curing the problem, as avoiding it ' yet there seems little doubt that by eliminating the largest of such stumbling blocks, Logue helped to build up the King's confidence, ensuring that the speech as a whole, with all the other lesser challenges it contained, proved less daunting.

"Ultimately, though, the crucial factor appears to have been the way in which Logue, from the start, managed to persuade his patient that his was no deep seated psychological affliction, but rather an almost mechanical problem that could be overcome through hard work and determination. An important part of this was the closeness of the relationship that developed between the two men, which was helped by Logue's non-nonsense approach. By insisting from the beginning that they should meet in his practice in Harley Street or at his own home, rather than on royal territory, Logue had made clear his intention that the King should be his patient; over the years this was to turn into a genuine friendship."