Jack London: A Life

Rating:
Summary: read it before you buy any other book
Review: A brilliant book because it captures the magic of London's life and reads as if he had written the book himself - fantastic stuff, and the academics should take note - this is how you bring a man and writer alive, not kill him with turgif analysis and prose. London would be proud.

Rating:
Summary: It sucked
Review: Frequent with biographies, the subjects by nature or design overshadow their conveyance, the lives greater than the telling. With Alex Kershaw's handling of London, the disjunctive telling of the life seems to overshadow the greatness of the subject. Kershaw provides documented anecdotal events in London's life, but these episodes are weakly connected, seemingly the paragraphs lack smooth continuity, making the reading of some sections an effort to connect the sequence of events a muddled mess. In a section of Chapter 4, "The Boy Socialist," Kershaw describes London's burn-out from cramming for entrance-exams for Berkeley, his passing with distinction, his fleeing the world by setting sail, his re-course to moor, his impulse to get drunk on shore, and then his arrival "at Berkeley in autumn 1896, in high spirits" (46-47). THEN, we're offered an ancedote about London's comeuppance in a boxing ring, a recollection by a contemporary about his attire, followed by the philosophical influence of Herbert Spencer's book (48). Kershaw's neglect of the biographer's role (and duty) to segue events, providing coherence and significance in the synthesizing of complex elemental parts to a life whole, distracts me from the subject. Yet I expect all biographies to be as great in the telling as their subjects, like Johnson's Boswell or Wolfe's Donald or Joyce and Wilde's Ellman or Genet's White. Kershaw does indeed emerge as a singular teller of a great life, and his telling is marked by fleeting absurdities involving subtly recurring images of human mastication and digestion: "Bite as he did, Jack did not fully digest the philosophies. He chose only that which tasted good, and then wolfed [sic] it down. The tastiest morsel . . . ." (48). Unfortunately, I was stuck with the tab, and here's my tip.

Rating:
Summary: Poor research?
Review: I wonder how accurate the rest of the book is when the author, Mr. Kershaw, did not care to notice that Dawson City, the Klondike, and surrounding region are not in Alaska but well inside Canada. He makes these erroneous references often.

Rating:
Summary: The book travels well-worn trails.
Review: I've read O'Conner, Stone and Sinclair's biographies of London, plus big swaths of others, including his daughter Joan; additionally, I've read many articles. [ Seeing a video interview of his youngest daughter Becky was also interesting.] And now I've read Kershaw's biography. It covers, really, no new ground, though it does expand a bit on the voyage of the "Snark". Yet, if one wants to get into that voyage specifically, there are Johnson, Charmain London and Jack himself to fall back on, re. journals and articles of that voyage. I'm afraid I agree with the "Kirkus Review" writer concerning Kershaw's biography, [included on this site]. There was just too much rehash--crib note stuff--of his stories and books. Kershaw wasted time. He got into works of fiction, at length, that are bad--amongst London's most agonizingly blatant hack work, ("Burning Daylight"). And more than anything, he did not try and plumb the depths of his wildly contradictory acts and words, not the least of which was London's addled racism. Lastly, he did not thrust London and his fame into proper context--he began to do it, then backed off. A reader gets too little social context, and with London--that's really necessary. Still, I found the book worth reading, and if this work was the reader's first biographical exposure to London--I can see where it would work far better.

Rating:
Summary: It sucked
Review: It was so terrible, it made me want to kill myself

Rating:
Summary: Simply The Best
Review: Simply the best biography I have ever read. Jack London wrote stories that pale in comparison to the excitement and drama of his life.