Why England Slept US$40,000 in royalties for Kennedy. Those from the British sales were donated to Plymouth, England, recently bombed by the Luftwaffe, while Kennedy bought a Buick convertible with his income from the book's North-American sales. Joseph Kennedy had initially approached Harold Laski to write the book's foreword, but Laski declined, feeling that it was "the book of an immature mind; that if it hadn't been written by the son of a very rich man, he wouldn't have found a publisher." Why England Slept Why England Slept is the published version of a thesis written by John F. Kennedy while in his
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