bookshelf

THE LITERARY CHURCHILL

Name: THE LITERARY CHURCHILL
Author: Jonathan Rose
ISBN: 978-0-300-20407-0

AUTHOR, READER, ACTOR

by Jonathan Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2014

Rose’s swift, incisive narrative portrays Churchill as a brilliant, if flawed, manipulator of political theater and a star...

bookshelf

A study of the statesman that demonstrates how “literature can illuminate political behavior in ways that more conventional methodologies cannot.”

From his early career as an intrepid journalist through his roles in nearly every post in the British government, Winston Churchill (1874-1965) fashioned himself as the hero. “There was no clear distinction between Churchill the soldier, Churchill the politician, and Churchill the author,” writes Rose (History/Drew Univ.; The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2001, etc.). “[A]ll three were engaged in performing and publicizing a common narrative.” That narrative reflected Churchill’s ardent belief in both his own greatness and the “great man” theory of history. “In Politics,” he wrote to his mother, “a man, I take it, gets on not so much by what he does, as by what he is. It is not so much a question of brains as of character & originality.” Churchill’s character, Rose argues, was shaped by books: history (especially authors who championed an imperialist worldview), novels (H.G. Wells was a favorite) and plays (George Bernard Shaw). “Churchill was congenitally ornery, an inborn individualist who kicked against any kind of restrictions,” writes Rose. “His reading informed, refined, and mobilized his instinctive libertarianism to political action.” His political views emerged in his huge output of writing, as well: novels, memoirs, biographies and history. Fiction and fact often blurred in his work; he recognized that deft selection of details could “transform a military disaster into an aesthetic triumph.” Nor did facts hamper his oratory: “When politics is theatre,” writes the author, “the substance matters less than the script. Often Churchill was a prisoner of his own rhetoric, willing to adopt almost any ideological stance as long as it offered an opportunity for a great solo performance.”

Rose’s swift, incisive narrative portrays Churchill as a brilliant, if flawed, manipulator of political theater and a star of a tumultuous long-running drama: the history of the British Empire.

Pub Date: May 27, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-300-20407-0

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: March 26, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

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.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

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...

bookshelf

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)