Why England Slept "The New York Times," to assist in redrafting the thesis, which had originally been titled "Appeasement At Munich". The writer Garry Wills claims that this assistance amounted to rewriting and retitling the manuscript, as well as finding an agent for its publication. As ambassador to Britain, Kennedy, Sr. supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement during the late 1930s. John F. Kennedy lived with his father in Britain at that time and as such witnessed the Luftwaffe's bombings of Britain first-hand. After publication in 1940, the book sold 80,000 copies in the United Kingdom and the United States, collecting
While Europe Slept critic trained as a scholar, and a pity, for startling facts require careful verification". "While Europe Slept" was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the 2006 "Criticism" category, a choice condemned in some quarters. The board's president, John Freeman, wrote that he had "never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s "While Europe Slept"", adding that in his opinion, Bawer's "hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia". A former winner of the Award, Eliot Weinberger, labelled the book "racism as criticism". A member of the Critics Circle committee, J. Peder