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ON NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

Name: ON NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
Author: D.J. Taylor
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3800-5

A BIOGRAPHY

by D.J. Taylor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2019

A lively, engaging, concise biography of a novel.

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The life and times of a “glittering futurist extravaganza.”

Biographer and novelist Taylor (Rock and Roll Is Life, 2018, etc.) describes George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as “an exposé of the totalitarian mind,” perhaps the “first Cold War novel,” and “one of the key texts necessary for an understanding of the twenty-first century.” High praise for a book Orwell (1903-1950) laconically described to his publisher in 1947 as a “fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel.” Taylor’s 2003 biography of Orwell won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography. Here, he zeroes in on Orwell’s final book. He delves deeply and brightly into the making of the novel, its inspiration, how Orwell wrote it, and how it was received critically, socially, and politically then and afterward. It took Orwell five years to write. He was quite ill and in hibernation on the rugged Isle of Jura, off Scotland’s coast, and died less than a year after it was published in 1949. “By writing about the terrors that obsessed him,” writes Taylor, “he had got them out of his system.” The novel is a “devastating analysis of the corruption of language,” a “dystopian horror world…and more.” Taylor also deftly shows how “many of its incidental fragments turn out to have been robbed wholesale from the life that ran along beside it.” He demonstrates how Orwell generated the narrative while also continuing to contribute to magazines, exploring the political and social landscape. The 1943 Allied leaders’ Tehran Conference gave “his consciousness a decisive kick, and he was able to clarify his vision for Nineteen Eighty-Four after he read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Before Orwell died, he believed “something resembling [the fascist society depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four] could arrive.” Taylor provides a good introduction to the work, but for more detail on the novel’s impact on popular culture, look to Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth.

A lively, engaging, concise biography of a novel.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4197-3800-5

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Abrams

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LOST GIRLS
by D.J. Taylor

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THE WINDSOR FACTION
by D.J. Taylor

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DERBY DAY
by D.J. Taylor

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)