An unusual perspective illuminates a much written-about author.
A biography of George Orwell (1903-1950) based on his “obsessive relationship with smell.”
Having recently lost his sense of smell, Sutherland (Emeritus, English/Univ. College, London; A Little History of Literature, 2013, etc.) noticed that Orwell was hypersensitive to odors and loved the smell of farmyard animals and other “uplifting natural smells.” Although Sutherland asserts that it is possible to trace “scent narratives” in Orwell’s fiction, his “nasocriticism” rarely fulfills that project. Instead, Sutherland offers a brisk biographical overview, drawing in part from previous biographies that he admires: Bernard Crick’s, authorized by Orwell’s widow (1980), and later works by D.J. Taylor and Gordon Bowker, both published in 2003. Sutherland’s Orwell is awkward, cynical, and generally unsympathetic. He was a bright student, winning a scholarship to a prestigious prep school, and then went on to Eton, where he met two influential and wealthy young men who helped him to get published; one “immensely and discretely” supported him as he lay dying of tuberculosis. Poverty was a consistent theme in Orwell’s life and work. Sutherland does not dispute rumors that Orwell was a “flagellophile” who derived “a fetishized sexual thrill from the whip and being whipped,” nor that he went to Burma (“the biggest brothel in the Empire”) for sex; nor that he was attracted by “the androgynous beauty of the dominant Burmese race.” As a young man, he botched his relationship with a girlfriend by nearly raping her as they walked through the countryside, a landscape that Orwell found “wildly aphrodisiac.” When he finally married, in 1936, his mother told his new wife that she must be “a brave girl” to marry her son. The couple lived in an “uncomfortably primitive” house in a remote village, where they tried to farm. Sutherland offers three “smell narratives” as appendices, but, otherwise, few odors waft through the book.
An unusual perspective illuminates a much written-about author.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78023-648-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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