Customer Reviews

Maughams Choice of Kiplings Best

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PBS did a production of My Boy Jack which dealt with Rudyard Kipling's experience in World War I in patriotism in helping his son get into the military, whereupon Jack died in battle. It was from this that I happened upon the above used book for 30 cents and it called out to me to be read.

The forward by Somerset Maugham is both a mixture of why I dislike the David Letterman types at parties in being expert on all and after one thinks they are your friend they turn around and give you a bad review.
Mr. Kipling was so successful he bred a great deal of resentment from lesser liberal authors. The same type of catharsis America is dealing with in Barack Obama is carried out in the rejection of Kipling's love of his Queen Victoria England for a new idea which is yet to be proven.

Maugham does compliment Kipling, but only after taking his stories apart like Kipling was supposed to be Newton in composing scientific law.
Rudyard Kipling was about the wonder of life born in colonial India, watching unappreciated British subjects rule a nation of castes which is equal to today in the poor still selling their children to rich people around the world and the rich ruling on their ordered way.

Kipling touches in his stories on the British saving the people of India in famine in romance and honor. He delights your imagination in tales of the spirit world woven into the mix of ordinary life which was so much in vogue then. In reading Kipling you see how much his ideas have been plagiarized from Stephen King to how the greatest outdoor writer in Peter Hathaway Capstick was speaking of Kipling in his wonderful books about Africa.

The shame in this is Disney has so ruined Rudyard Kipling for the masses. Most people think Kipling is children's books when Kipling even in his children's tales was speaking to adults.
This best of Kipling is adult short stories which are wonderful. I especially enjoyed Tomb of His Ancestor and William the Conqueror for their mix of what India was like to the real drama of of human nature.

Rudyard Kipling is someone all should read. They should curl up with his work reading it in front of crackling fires or cuddle with their children before they fall asleep reading them the tales of Kipling Sahib.

I had never read Kipling before, except in the people who modeled their work after him. In some ways, my writing is based upon Kipling from other authors who loved his prose too. In some ways, I write as Kipling unknown as his poetic soul is for the generations in brilliance inspiring by God's Grace time and again the beauty of crafted words from Psalms to the poetry of Rudyard Kipling.

I strongly recommend Kipling for his explanation without trying in historically educating the public on south central Asia as it's fires burn today yet in chaos. I recommend Kipling because if one is 6 or 96 there is a voice of a friend in his words which encompasses the soul and warms it in the common fires of conversation in humanity.

Rudyard Kipling is hope and that hope of his soul flows in his stories like the spark of his tiger burning bright fires which brightens the soul in the beautiful smile of all he gives in a master storyteller who is timeless as the perpetual pendulum clock of the life he wrote of.

God bless and I hope this inspires and helps people to take the step in reading more of Kipling Sahib.

PS: If you saw the movie, The Man who would be King, Kipling's few short pages are much more alive and vibrant than that 2 hour movie.