A solid, eminently readable work of scholarly detection and high-toned chicanery.
A revealing study of two masters of self-invention, “invented by empire, then cultivated in the nostalgic soil of exile.”
In 1913, Ikbal Shah, the son of minor Indian nobility, traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland, to become, as historian Green writes, “entangled in the larger contests of empire and its unraveling.” After treating wounded soldiers from the battlefields of World War I, he abandoned his plans to become a doctor and instead turned to writing. He married a Scottish woman and set to work crafting a literary and journalistic career that coincided with the postwar resurgence of Scottish nationalism, which admitted other nationalisms, as well. According to one journalist, Shah was “an Eastern poet [who] dreams of his Motherland and voices in English the visions of his people.” His people were, it happens, largely invented: For one thing, he positioned himself as an expert on Afghan Sufis, “whom he had actually never encountered,” while claiming himself to be an Afghan nobleman. Moreover, he articulated a Sufism that was detached from Islam, a stance that his son, the better-known writer Idries Shah, broadened. Idries took numerous wandering side paths before positioning himself, like his father, as an authority on Sufism, and he wrote extensively on witchcraft and magic under various names. Both father and son traveled in rarefied literary circles featuring the likes of George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Robert Graves, but Idries was less shy about creating whole-cloth identities. Though he was exposed several times for charlatan acts, he managed to retain his Gurdjieff-like allure among the metaphysically inclined. Green concludes by noting the modern Near East’s descent into religion-tinged wars, in which “happy talk of dervishes dissolved in the dust of explosions” and the fictive works of the Shahs were suddenly no longer relevant.
A solid, eminently readable work of scholarly detection and high-toned chicanery.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781324002413
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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