Customer Reviews

Disraeli

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

As those before me have said, DONT BOTHER. It's sad that so great an author as Christopher Hibbert was allowed by his publisher to put out this book which is just a rehash of a book he wrote about Disraeli 30 years ago. Except that mostly it's with a lot of additional material that is only excerpt from letters he wrote and those written to him.

Soooo much of the book is wasted on discussions of people who meant nothing to him in his later life and seem like nothing but fill. If this was a student paper it would fail.

There is a very good short bio by Edgar Feuchtwanger, and two monstrous volumes (over 700 pages) by Robert Lord Blake, and Stanley Weintraub.

An embarrasing and lazy pastiche of quotes from Disraeli's correspondence woven with an old fashioned snobbish viewpoint. There is no historical context and no discussion of what made Disraeli the importasnt figure he was. Disraeli comes off as a self-serving, superficial and useless fop, lusting after high-class recognition. This bojk should have been rejected in manuscript. Whatever reputation Mr. Hibbert may have had, it is vitiated by this piece of sophomoric drivel.

A miserably rendered biography of one of the most complex men in British history. Hibbert writes from within his comfortable, unexamined cell of "Britishness." He superficially dismisses Disraeli's Jewish upbringing with a wave of the hand, showing not a whit of insight or interest into how it may have affected Disraeli's adult behavior--his choices of dandyism, novel writing, and even his peculiarly powerful oratory. Hibbert just neatly fits Disraeli into categories he, Hibbert, pulls out of his own experience from within what's normal and usual in British life. Moreover, the book quotes huge, unedited swaths not only of Disraeli's letters and journals (somewhat defensible) but also from other recent biographers. So it reads like the work of an undergraduate. Ultimately, Hibbert is not at all inquisitive about what led this man of many and great parts to find such a singular way to live, and to succeed in what, in the book's only success, we see was a terribly hostile social environment for a Jew(populated by powerful anti-Semites like Carlyle and Dickens, Trollope, etc.). This is poorly done work.

This is not so much a biography as an itinerary. Benjamin Disraeli went to a country house in High Bascombe-on-Boring, the seat of Lord Irrelevant Nobody, and his wife, the daughter of Viscount Who Cares? and the cousin of the mistress of the architect of another country house Disraeli visited ten years later. Oh, and he was vain and self-promoting, but gave great speeches. Or so he says, in his letters, which (as noted in the other reviews) appear to be the author's exclusive sources. We don't know what they were about, but, boy, did he ever think they were great! I don't know what the author thought, either, about Disraeli, or why he wrote such a book. What puzzles me, and what I have yet to figure out, is, who is the intended audience? Who would ever want an utterly non-political book about Benjamin Disraeli? His only interest to posterity -- which is substantial yet ignored here -- is as a politician and statesman. Everything else -- and especially his travelogue and endless fetes with foreign dignitaries --is unworthy of our attention. This is an astonishingly lazy book by a writer who apparently only wanted to add another impressive title to his bibliography. Fine. But leave us out of it.

I only knew Disraeli was a Prime Minister under Queen Victoria. This book is thought provoking as one learns about his entire life and wonders where his great abilities came from. He masked his genius with a foppish exterior. I would recommend this biography to anyone interested in British politics or the 19th century.

Mr. Hibbert strings together quotes from letters written by Disraeli and other sources to tell a social history of this great personality of the age of Queen Victoria.

Readers seeking a political biography, or at even some basic historical context for the daily life of this politician/author, will seek in vain. Best for those wanting insights into how the rich and powerful (including the good Queen) of the time whiled away their insipid days.

The saving grace to this book is the many examples--mostly from Disraeli's pen--it provides of that era's beautiful use of the written English language.