Where There's a Will [Hardcover]

John Mortimer (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: VIKING (2004)
• ASIN: B000ND40I2
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's best to go out laughing, June 28, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (Hardcover)

Not all of this is to my taste, but Mortimer is a wonderful comic writer with a really supreme sense of the foibles of human life and character. He takes nothing too seriously and certainly not himself and in these short chapters, thirty- two on all on various aspects of his life with the law, his family, he entertains and provides us perhaps one basic lesson: i.e.
If one has to go through it it's best to go through it with a smile. And if one has to go out, and one does have to go out, it's best to do it in laughter.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant, wise, and humorously self-effacing, August 7, 2006

By 

Paul J. Papanek "latoxdoc" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (Hardcover)

I should first confess my bias--I have often been tickled and sometimes awed by Mortimer's way with English prose for 20 years. So, in picking up this book I had the high expectations one might have before meeting an old friend or beloved teacher. No disappointment. Even if some of these essays are slightly less effervescent than others, all are at least wonderful, and several are both brilliant and touching.

Mortimer has given us a collection of short essays, conversational and often wryly funny, which he intends as a kind of spiritual bequeathal to his family and other heirs. The chapters range across a broad range of subjects, some perhaps outwardly frivolous, like the cooking of eggs. But in the main, Mortimer touches on matters of great substance--the nature of beauty, how to be happy, surprising ways in which our world has managed to be unjust, places and times for sex, how to dine sociably, the love of children, faith and reason, the terrors of the writer facing blank paper, and many more. I found these essays to be wise and absolutely delicious. I suspect that readers who have enjoyed Rumpole, or Mortimer's other biographical essays like Summer of a Doormouse, or Clinging to the Wreckage, will be quite pleased with these sketches.

Mortimer may, sadly, be nearing the end of his life, but at present he seems to be on a literary tear. I, for one, wish him many more prolific years.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rational Thoughts, April 11, 2006

By 

Sal (Buffalo, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (Hardcover)

Sir John Mortimer is an extremely literate and honestly open-minded person who writes with a flowing exquisiteness of the English language. This small book of his thoughts on a good life is a reminiscence of the life he has led and is still leading. He mentions a lot of classical literary authors and their characters that would further enrich a person's knowledge. Also, the various types of people he met working at the Old Bailey has surely enhanced his art of observing and putting their perspectives onto paper. Together with wild imaginations of his, no wonder his many writings are keenly absorbed by the public. The last ten chapters are my favorite but in each I find something to laugh out loud about. This is his own story and the way he tells it is invigorating. In not so many words in each section, he still succeeds in relaying his message that is predominantly deliberate.