Rudyard Kipling and His World (Pictorial Biography) [Hardcover]

Kingsley Amis (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Ltd; First edition (November 10, 1975)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500130523
• ISBN-13: 978-0500130520
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,414,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars RUDYARD KIPLING, and THAMES AND HUDSON: Fine Book Meets Perfect Publisher, October 26, 2011

By 

T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rudyard Kipling and His World (Pictorial Biography) (Hardcover)

I don't recall ever having noticed Thames and Hudson Publishers (T&H) before reading the firm's 1975 commissioned study by Kingsley Amis, RUDYARD KIPLING: WITH 114 ILLUSTRATIONS. The book also appeared slightly earlier, as I recall, with a slightly different title, RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (Pictorial Biography Hardcover). My splendid paperback, alas, is no longer listed in T&H's online catalog. But it is easily purchased on line and is well worth the money.

Thames and Hudson commissioned Sir Kingsley Amis, poet, novelist, critic, to write RUDYARD KIPLING for its Literary Lives Series. A happy, happy marriage of content and presentation. The 128-page text has 114 black and white illustrations. They make up by bulk perhaps 40% of what lies between the book's covers. At book's end fully nine pages go to "List of Illustrations" in useful detail.

Sir Kingsley Amis reviews Kipling's life and family from his parents' UK marriage in March 1865 and "Ruddy's" birth in Bombay till his death in England in 1936, not long after his 70th birthday. He began his working life in Lahore, India at age 16 as an Assistant Editor, later held the same position on a more prestigious Anglo-Indian daily in Allahabad and retained features of journalistic writing to the end of his days. He always wrote fast, framed quite a few of his India stories, e.g. THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, as tales told by participants to a sympathetic journalist, and wrote directly, simply and to the point.

His first book, BARRACK ROOM BALLADS, was poetry, his secon, PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS, was prose. By age 24 he was living and writing in London, already with a bit of reputation which soon soared. Until perhaps 1930, according to Kingsley Amis, Kipling was the most widely read poet and story teller in the English-speaking world. His verses were set to music, most notably, "Danny Deever" and "On the Road to Mandalay." Some became plays. At least three movie versions (1937, 1977, 1995) of his fishing novel CAPTAINS COUAGEOUS are readily availabe in DVD or VHS. Spencer Tracy won an Oscar for playing Portuguese fisherman Manuel in the earliest film, which also included Freddie Bartholomew, Lionel Barrymore and Mickey Rooney.

Amis sees work and everything to do with work as a defining value for Kipling and his characters. A man is his work. In his very last work, finished two weeks before his death, Rudyard Kipling took loving leave of the tools of his craft of writing: paper, pen, ink, studio. It is for every man or woman (or in the case of CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS of every teenager) to find for himself the work that he is most qualified for and then do it to the best of his ability. This even applied to nations. "Take up the white man's burden," was America's work when it relieved Spain without cause of the Philippine Islands. White Englishmen were, temporarily, best suited to rule India. But it was their duty to train up natives as their replacements. Work was responsibility, duty. Do the work foreordained for you and take your proper place in the world. If you become a ruler, it will not be because of heredity or through influence or bribery. You will have earned the right to rule.

A second major theme, much emphasized in THE JUNGLE BOOK and THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK is the mysterious "law," within whose framework all creatures do their "work."

Kingsley Amis's RUDYARD KIPLING WITH 114 ILLUSTRATIONS is a handsome book, with a thick paper cover displaying three faceless British soldiers marching forward, accompanied by three Indian bearers. Let it proudly adorn your favorite coffee table. You should have read at least a book or two of Kipling's before tackling Amis's meditations and suggestions. But at the end of Amis's text, you will know where to head next into Kipling's poems, prose, travel writings or even science fiction (one British sci-fi writer declared Rudyard Kipling "the father of modern science fiction").

-OOO-