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Sto caricando le informazioni... Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill: A Brief Account of a Long Life (2003)di Gretchen Rubin
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Entertaining. Rubin's JFK book is better. ( ) An intruiging take at a biography of a very odd man. Aimed at, I would say, a freshman-in-college level audience, Rubin breaks up the story of Chruchill into 40 short chapters. In addition to hopping around Churchill's life, recounting his speeches and his oddities, she attempts to deconstruct the notion of a biography by writing parts of chapters from radically different points of view, some of them personal, some of them conflicting. Although occasionally repetative and not always 100% successful, the result is in some ways a more balanced biography than a much longer volume. In terms of content, though, it is rather thin, so think of this book as an appetizer rather than a main course. I first encountered Gretchen Rubin through her blog The Happiness Project. This was during a time when I was thoroughly depressed and needed all the advice I could get. The blog explores the small and large things a person can do in order to feel happier. Rubin makes an engaging blogger; a Yalie lawyer who clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor, she approaches the main problem of philosophy with the brio and curiosity of an inveterate note-taker. ("Zoinks, I love to take notes," she writes. Any woman who combines curiosity with a vocabulary that includes the word "zoinks" is okay by me.) Rubin has written a couple of hodgepodgey books, one of which I just finished: Forty Ways of Looking at Winston Churchill. This book forsakes the dull chronological march of the typical biography to present the reader with multiple glimpses and viewpoints of the ultimate British bulldog. The result is delightful, says I. It is also meta-biographical, since, by juxtaposing different versions of Churchill, Rubin reveals the ways in which biographies always reveal only certain sides of their subjects. Churchill (as the author delightedly notes) lived a life that would have seemed incredible in fiction. His outsize personality, endless string of accomplishments, frequent quotability, and (oh yeah) the fact that he almost single-handedly saved Western Civilization from Hitler...they all make him too vivid to be real, yet he was. If you want to read about him, and I think you should, start here. A good book giving you a sense of the many sideds to the man and his times. I am not an real fan of biography but this was short and by approaching from 40 angles you get close to a 360 view. I think the idea of 40 ways to view a subject is great and beats a linear approach. It also allows for complexity and contradiction - something I prefer rather than someone having a "take" on a character either positive or critical. The only critisism is that the author's heart did not seem to be in the "anti" Churchill chapters - they were a bit mechanical or essay like - perhaps fair enough given that it is pretty hard to be convincing given Chirchill was fighting Hitler and that the war was in fact won. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Warrior and writer, genius and crank, rider in the British cavalry's last great charge and inventor of the tank--Winston Churchill led Britain to fight alone against Nazi Germany in the fateful year of 1940 and set the standard for leading a democracy at war. Like no other portrait of its famous subject, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is a dazzling display of facts more improbable than fiction, and an investigation of the contradictions and complexities that haunt biography. Gretchen Craft Rubin gives readers, in a single volume, the kind of rounded view usually gained only by reading dozens of conventional biographies. With penetrating insight and vivid anecdotes, Rubin makes Churchill accessible and meaningful to twenty-first-century readers with forty contrasting views of the man: he was an alcoholic, he was not; he was an anachronism, he was a visionary; he was a racist, he was a humanitarian; he was the most quotable man in the history of the English language, he was a bore. In crisp, energetic language, Rubin creates a new form for presenting a great figure of history--and brings to full realization the depiction of a man too fabulous for any novelist to construct, too complicated for even the longest narrative to describe, and too valuable ever to be forgotten. Includes a bonus PDF with additional resources. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)941.084092History and Geography Europe British Isles Historical periods of British Isles 1837- Period of Victoria and House of Windsor 1936-1945Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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