Though occasionally fawning, an accessible, textured story of one man who intimately knew the slings and arrows of...
Book-publishing veteran and prolific historian Korda (With Wings Like Eagles: The Untold Story of the Battle of Britain, 2009, etc.) offers a comprehensive, admiring treatment of one of England’s most popular if controversial military celebrities, T.E. Lawrence (1888–1935).
The author does not restrain his enthusiasm for, and even awe of, his subject. He calls Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1927) “one of the great pieces of modern writing about war” and compares him with a dizzying range of characters, from Odysseus to Princess Diana. At first, Korda uses Joseph Campbell’s work of comparative mythology, Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), to provide a framework, then, mercifully, abandons it. The author begins during World War I with the involvement of the diminutive young Lawrence, still in his 20s, already fluent in Arabic and other languages and already an authority on the Middle East. Korda describes military and political maneuvers and then retreats to narrate Lawrence’s complicated birth (his parents were not married), boyhood, education and young manhood. Throughout, the author emphasizes Lawrence’s deeply troubled relationship with his mother, but he also underscores his ferocious work habits, enormously high pain threshold (captured by the enemy, he endured severe beatings and rape) and unique combination of modesty (he refused honors) and pride (he wrote many letters to newspapers and cultivated friendships with George Bernard Shaw, Lady Astor, Thomas Hardy and others). Lawrence’s military and political successes in the Middle East are undeniable, but his postwar life was a disturbing mixture of depression, enormous celebrity, a deep ambivalence about routine military life (he was in and out of the RAF) and sexual confusions. A motorcycle accident killed him at age 46.
Though occasionally fawning, an accessible, textured story of one man who intimately knew the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-171261-6
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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