Customer Reviews

The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work

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I'll give this biography of Kipling a top rating but with a couple of reservations. First, "Strange Ride" is very, very English. Some of the references and phrasing are incomprehensible to Americans -- or at least this American. It's the old problem of two countries divided by a common language which is really not so common. Secondly, the author presumes a fair amount of advance knowledge about Kipling by the reader. If you think kipling is something the Brits eat for breakfast, you probably won't comprehend this book. Read some of Kipling's stories and poems and a simpler biography of his life before trying this one.

Reservations aside, this is an insightful literary biography in which the author derives most of his views from Kipling's own writing. Rather than focusing on daily events in Kipling's life or a chronology the author is more interested in broad themes. One theme, for example, to which he refers frequently is Kipling's lifelong apprehension about his place in society because he never went to a University or punched the other tickets to acceptance by Victorian society. A second theme is Kipling's interest in children and his own searing experiences as a child. A third is Kipling's concept of duty, "take up the White man's burden--send forth the best ye breed."

The author does some outstanding interpretations of many of Kipling's works, including his masterpiece, "Kim," and stories such as "Dayspring Mishandled" and "The Church that was at Antioch."

Clever and immensely talented, Kipling was also a flawed and incomplete artist which makes him more interesting as a person than the ordinary. He is surely one of the most maligned of all major literary figures, but only Shakespeare has produced more memorable and quotable lines of verse. Probably no other story by any author has had such an impact as "Mowgli's Brothers" from "The Jungle Book." Several movies, the Boy Scouts, and the Tarzan myth all derive from "The Jungle Book."

As noted above this is not always an easy book. The National Review selected "Strange Ride" as one of the top 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century. I'm not sure I agree, but it is a worthwhile biography about the most important writer of England's latter days of imperial glory.

Smallchief