A solid scholarly biography with little to savor for general readers. Lycett’s subject remains an aloof, disagreeable enigma.
An exhaustive and exhausting biography of Ian Fleming (1908–1964), the creator of secret agent James Bond.
Lycett (The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 2008, etc.) offers an overwhelming wealth of detail covering every facet and period of Fleming’s life: the privileged yet turbulent boyhood, including school days at Eton (where Fleming excelled athletically if not academically), his distinguished service with the British Naval Intelligence Division in World War II, his tenures as a journalist and stockbroker (mixed results), and his phenomenal success penning the adventures of Bond. Throughout, Lycett copiously explicates Fleming’s habits, social connections, many romantic affairs, tempestuous relationships with his wife and mother, housing circumstances and academic pursuits. The sheer volume of biographical detail simultaneously impresses and oppresses the reader, as a portrait of a rather unpleasant, even cruel man emerges from the vast thickets of names, dates, clubs, houses, appointments and general ephemera. Lycett’s emphasis is squarely on Fleming, not his famous creation, and the subject ultimately fails to justify the author’s intense attention and industry. As presented here, Fleming was a cold and callous product of privilege, a diffident man of diffuse talents. Lycett studiously reports on Fleming’s writing habits, research gathering and the business aspects of the Bond books, but he doesn’t offer much in the way of literary analysis or a consideration of Bond’s place in popular culture. This is a densely detailed book about a man who, in the course of many other activities, wrote popular novels about a spy, not a reckoning with the creator of an enduring modern myth. Fleming scholars will find this a useful resource, but Bond aficionados won’t find much to compel them.
A solid scholarly biography with little to savor for general readers. Lycett’s subject remains an aloof, disagreeable enigma.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03798-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
