An illuminating study of two great English fantasy writers and the wars that shaped their imaginations.
Hobbits in the trenches.
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are two of the most widely read 20th-century British writers. For both men, the ideals of British-ness centered on the communal life of the village, the heroism of everyday people in great times, and the attempt to bring together a fecund imagination with a faith in a Christian god. Many things shaped their writings, not the least being their scholarship in the medieval English language. Beowulf, Chaucer, and romance adventure gave them a vocabulary for fantasy and faith. Both men looked back, too, to their experiences as soldiers in World War I for the vividness of conflict. And, as they lived through World War II on the home front, their memories came back to them, invigorating imagined places with the gore and grit of the trenches. At the heart of their work is a theme, writes historian and filmmaker Loconte: “the necessity of individual courage to combat evil.” That individual courage had to be found in the ordinary man, the Hobbit, the person like us, who was “not made for perilous quests.” Such men were like the men with whom they fought. And in the 1930s and ’40s, when Tolkien, Lewis, and their contemporaries came together in conversation and scholarship at Oxford, they bonded in the shared need to “cordon” off the fears of combat. The pub, the library, and the college common room made “space for relationships that were meaningful, for conversations rich in wit and wisdom, and for creative work that could inspire and enchant. For Tolkien and Lewis, male friendship fulfilled all of these needs like nothing else.” At their most fantastic, both writers were at their most real and personal.
An illuminating study of two great English fantasy writers and the wars that shaped their imaginations.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781400247936
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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