Rating: 
Summary: The Gigli of works on Churchill
Review: It must have been a rainy weekend in the Hamptons, when author Gretchen Rubin sat down to start and complete this book. What a waste of time, at least on the reader's part.
This book should be retitled "Gretchen Rubin's 40 ways to look at Winston Churchill," since it consists mainly of snippets of facts interspersed among her slanted views of the man. Her clearly leftist personal sentiments have an influence over this entire work.
It adds nothing to the knowledge of Churchill, even for those without the fortitude to read the Manchester or Gilbert works. If you're looking for an introductory work, or a short-cut on a very long and varied life, then go to either Roy Jenkins' Churchill or John Lukacs' Churchill.
But don't waste your time or money on this tripe... go see Gigli instead -- It's a more enjoyable experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant both in form and substance
Review: The amazing thing about this book -- and what makes it so satisfying to read -- is that it both satisfies the craving for biography (it's crammed with fascinating facts about Churchill and different portraits of his personality) and undermines the idea that there can ever be a unitary, authoritative biography, especially of so complex a personality as Churchill's. This book is a great gift both for your husband, dad, or grandpa the history buff, and for your intellectual English major daughter, who might grow up to be the next Gretchen Rubin someday.
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Summary: Deconstructing Churchill
Review: The chronological narrative form of biography, in use orally long before man put quill to papyrus, is a fun and satisfying way to consider a life, but Rubin demonstrates that a new format can be more illuminating, and even pleasurable.For ever, the greatest biographers have been slaves to their thesis and the dramatic arc of their story. Released from the traditional constraints, though, Rubin is able to explore certain interesting aspects of Churchill's life and their meanings more objectively and from many more angles than any other biography could do. For better and for worse, her new format is of our time. It allows the reader to skip around and focus on only the topic of special interest. Read the chapter on Churchill as father, and it is complete in a way that an excerpt from Manchester cannot be. Even the tone and writing style of each section varies widely, in accordance to the feature she is exploring. Rubin's "40 Ways" structure will no doubt be mimicked, perhaps by her, certainly by others, for many years to come.
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Summary: Execrable Editing
Review: This already short book should be about 50 pages shorter yet. It is laced with repeated quotes, phrases, and facts. The first time you read that Churchill carried a lance in one of history's last cavalry charges, it's fascinating. The second time, it's a surprise to see the statement repeated almost verbatim. The third time, it's an insult. Again and again (and again), this pattern is repeated. On one page, the same clause from a Churchill quote appears three times. Enough already. It's bad enough that the writer made this mistake, but it's unforgivable for the editor to let it pass for publication in this shape. By paring 50 pages off the manuscript, it would be just what it claims to be -- not a bad short rehash of the existing Churchill biographies. Save your money. Get another Churchill biography.
Rating: 
Summary: Wishing for more
Review: This book must have been a delightful intellectual exercise for the author-a self initiated challenge to come up with 40 different ways to look at one of the most written about figures in history, Winston Churchill. Unfortunately, from the reader's point of view, it is largely an exercise in futility that fails to shed much illumination on its subject. This is too bad, because the author appears to be intelligent, articulate, and knowledgeable about her subject. But she is handcuffed by the approach she has chosen.None of the 40 chapters is long enough to provide anything but the most superficial of glimpses. Some of them are just lists of facts or names, In several chapters she argues opposing points of view with the facility of a lawyer (she is one) who can represent either side. But the arguments are two short to provide meaningful information, and the author offers no judgment about which side she actually comes down on and why. Its more a parlor trick than an effective means of getting at the subject. I share the author's passion for Churchill, and have a number of books about him. But I lost interest in this one about halfway through. The scattershot approach and the failure to put forward a coherent judgment on the subject (World Savior? Flawed hero? Dangerous Villain? ) robs this of drama, passion, and vitality, and fails to offer much of interest to fill the void.
Rating:
Summary: Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchi;;
Review: This is a great book for those who have read Gilbert and Manachester as well as those who are not familar with the extradinary life of Churchill. Rubin has written a wonderfully concise review of this dominate figure of the 20th century. She is able to present various views of a Churchill's very full life in an extremely engaging way. It will make you think or rethink how Churchill was able to accomplish so much. She even provides the reader with a quiz to test their knowledge of the subject. This book will certainly get the reader started on learning more about history and how a man can shape world events.I look forward to other works by Gretchen Rubin.
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Summary: A Grand Portrait of a Great Man
Review: This is an excellent book -- a must for Churchill fans. Many of my favorite stories about Sir Winston are here, but I also learned lots of things I didn't know. (Do you know what the Great Man's last words were? What his favorite brand of cigar was? Whether he was a hero to his valet? Read the book and find out.) "Forty Ways" is an extraordinarily honest book: Rubin does not pretend that a biographer can know it all. She presents both sides to questions about Churchill's drinking, his "black dog" depressions, his relations with the two Randolphs in his life (his father and his son), his egotism ("I am so conceited," Churchill wrote his mother, that "I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending" as an early death). There is no effort to deceive the reader here, to trick him into embracing the author's favorite theory: Rubin candidly admits that her Churchill is a hero and a great man, but she insists that the reader must draw his own conclusions. Rubin is splendid on Sir Winston's use of language, the blessings and burdens of his Spencer-Churchill heritage, his painting, his bulldog bellicosity, his "island nation" patriotism, his relations with Hitler, the Romantic qualities of his historical imagination, the "Dickensian aptness" of his name, his complicated relations with his wife. ("Oh my darling do not write of 'friendship' to me," Churchill told Clementine, "I love you more each month that passes and feel the need of you & all your beauty. . . . I am so devoured by egoism that I wd like to have another soul in another world & meet you in another setting, & pay you all the love and honour of the gt romances.") The end of the book is extraordinarily moving. The Churchill who emerges in "Forty Ways" is more complex than we knew. No traditional portrait, conceived and finished in a conventional way, can possibly do justice to the man Isaiah Berlin called "the largest human being of our time." Only an exercise in what the poet Keats called "negative capability" can possibly comprehend his contradictions. "Forty Ways" conveys the exquisiteness of the tensions in Churchill's life and personality without pretending to resolve them in the name of Thesis. Yet the effect is rather to add to his greatness; and the impression one comes away with is of a hero of Homeric proportions. The "horrors of war cannot rob the progress of the sun," Rubin quotes Churchill as saying. There is a world of intelligence in that line; the reader of the "Iliad" remembers that in that poem no day is so terrible but that the poet must describe the splendor of the sun when it rises and when it sets. Such an heroic vision was Churchill's as well.
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Summary: An English oak!
Review: This is one of two great new books on giant English oaks to appear recently, the other being Joel Hayward's outstanding "For God and Glory: Lord Nelson and His Way of War".
Neither books are biographies.
The Churchill book is an assessment of the various scholarly and popular perspectives of the great prime minister. The Nelson book is an analytical assessment of many previously ignored themes in Nelson's life.
Both books are original and illuminating, and rate as the best history books I've read in ages. Buy them both.
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Summary: Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchhill
Review: This is truly an outstanding book. Not only packed with facts and various opinions and thoughts of other individuals about Winston churchill, but how to interpret and understand these differences. Reading this book makes one a better reader and interpreter of History and Biography. It is a really great read.
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Summary: Fresh take on a well-told story
Review: This must have been a hard sell at the publishers: a brief book (only about 250 pages in a small format) on one of the most written-about subjects of recent history. And in a form that may never have been tried in biography before: not in chronological order but in 40 short chapters - each one, well, a different way to look at the subject. Yet Ms. Rubin pulls it off with seeming effortlessness. Her innovative format, rather than being gimmicky, does indeed bring a fresh approach to the facts of Churchill's life that many readers will already know well. And although not a historian of the stature of Manchester or Gilbert, her writing shows a clear and unabashed personal voice that brings enthusiasm, even intimacy, to a subject more often given a far weightier treatment. Future generations may eventually feel that the Churchill story is exhausted, but Ms. Rubin proves that there was indeed room for one more Churchill book on the shelf. This is a superb book. Buy it.
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