Quick Reviews
At one point a few years ago I made much of my living reviewing books for newspapers. Mainly history, biography and science but i was perfectly willing to review novels or whatever came to hand. The reviewing market has pretty much vanished in Canada and in much of the United States and I have moved on. But I still like reviewing.
So, an experiment:I am going to be posting reviews on this blog from time to time. They will have lot of Amazon links in them and, while my regular readers are unlikely to hit the links I am hoping that the irregulars as well as search engine arrivals may buy the occasional book. Which will let me buy more books to review and thus create a virtuous circle. The reviews will be short and will be of books I am reading rather than books which have been sent for review. However, if publicists or authors want to send me books by all means do and I will review them here.
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Anthony Powell: A Life
by Michael Barber
A quick tour through the long and seemingly happy life of Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time.
Powell’s life is a significant challenge to a biographer simply because Powell wrote so much about himself. Michael Barber rises to the challenge in Anthony Powell: A Life by stepping outside Powell’s own autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling and going to the many interviews Powell gave over his career as well as the recollections of his many friends.
Anthony Powell: A Life is an entertaining first cut at the definitive Powell biography and manages to avoid the dryness which too often infects literary biography. It does not, however, give much more sense of Powell’s private life or his social life than the Dance or the auto-biography does. It is, as Barber declares at the outset, not the authorized biography which is, apparently, to be written by another hand. Which means this Life is not informed by the letters of both Powell himself and his wife, Lady Violet.
The strength of this life is that it gives the reader the flavour of Powell’s life and his times.
If you are interested in Malcolm Muggeridge (before his religious mania struck), George OrwellorEvelyn Waugh Barber provides a quick and very readable guide to “the England which made them” through the eyes of one of the greatest observers of that England: Anthony Powell.
All gone now I am afraid.
Written by jay on December 29th, 2007 with
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