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Rating: 
Summary: A Very Important Contribution to the Art of Biography
Review: All of Isherwood's writing -- from "The Berlin Stories" to "Down There On A Visit" to "A Single Man" to name three -- derives from his actual life, but the work he did in the last years of it, from "Christopher and His Kind" on, is quite different. He sets about correcting a record we thought we knew. He's very insistent on identifying precisely what happened to him and his friends and why. The results will be quite surprising for those who think of him as someone who wrote special material for Liza Minnelli. "The Lost Years" is utterly unprecedented in the way it deals with Isherwood's love life. I have rarely read anything so frank or detailed about gay life. In writing this book, based on notes he'd scribbled decades before, it was very important to Isherwood to get to the heart of why and how he loved Bill Caskey (more a sex partner than a real romance) and others, prior to the grand entrance of Don Bachardy into his life. There's a lot in here about gay sexuality that I've never seen put down on paper quite in this way before -- though I recognize it from my own experiences as a gay man. And because of that I'm not at all surprised by the way the book has been dismissed by "mainstream" reviewers. The book's biggest revelation is how wild the late 40's were. Everybody talks about the 70's as being -- in Brad Gooch's words -- "The Golden Age of Promiscuity." It wasn't a blip on the radar screen compared to what was going on with Isherwood and company in Santa Monica canyon back in the 40's. HOO-YAH!
Rating:
Summary: "A Very Honest & Important Memoir"
Review: If your looking to know the real "Christopher Isherwood" this is the book to read first. I really enjoyed this memoir called "The Lost Years" 1945-1951 because of its openness & honesty. If your interested in Christopher's daily life in every detail, from his friends, sex partners, lovers, and acquaintances it's all here. I expected to get details about all faucets of his daily life from this memoir and that's exactly what I got. If your looking for a sugar coated boring sexless book, look elsewhere. Christopher is very honest in laying out in graphic detail his sexual conquests. But that's not to say the book is just about his sexual life, it's like I said about all the daily details of his everyday life for those years. There's a wonderful Chronology in the back of the book for a quick history lesson of his life, and a glossary that is outstanding that contains all the bio's and history of his friends, partners, and relatives. This book really opened my eyes to this wonderful writer, who happened to be gay. I thought the 90's were gay but after reading this book, things weren't much different back in the 40's. Gay life as we call it today, was really just as gay back then. Katherine Bucknell has done a wonderful job in editing this book, and gives us a wonderful introduction. Getting to know Christopher Isherwood as a writer and a human being has been a wonderful experience for me. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: "A Very Honest & Important Memoir"
Review: If your looking to know the real "Christopher Isherwood" this is the book to read first. I really enjoyed this memoir called "The Lost Years" 1945-1951 because of its openness & honesty. If your interested in Christopher's daily life in every detail, from his friends, sex partners, lovers, and acquaintances it's all here. I expected to get details about all faucets of his daily life from this memoir and that's exactly what I got. If your looking for a sugar coated boring sexless book, look elsewhere. Christopher is very honest in laying out in graphic detail his sexual conquests. But that's not to say the book is just about his sexual life, it's like I said about all the daily details of his everyday life for those years. There's a wonderful Chronology in the back of the book for a quick history lesson of his life, and a glossary that is outstanding that contains all the bio's and history of his friends, partners, and relatives. This book really opened my eyes to this wonderful writer, who happened to be gay. I thought the 90's were gay but after reading this book, things weren't much different back in the 40's. Gay life as we call it today, was really just as gay back then. Katherine Bucknell has done a wonderful job in editing this book, and gives us a wonderful introduction. Getting to know Christopher Isherwood as a writer and a human being has been a wonderful experience for me. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Isherwood Embarrassment
Review: This is the most embarrassing book I know written by a writer of literary reputation. It is a mean-spirited, self-aggrandizing work that will only detract from the author's standing as a serious author. There are repetitive renditions of affairs, including intimate details that make one wonder why this book, not finished, was published posthumously at all. Gossipy, and spiteful, awkwardly written, this is a shameful document, not literature.
Rating:
Summary: Isherwood Embarrassment
Review: This memoir raises the bar for sexual candor way above what we are used to, and that is a good thing. Isherwood, in commenting and elaborating on his sketchy daily calendar notes for these years, takes a fiercely critical view of himself and his obsessions and, in the process, reveals the very funny and humane man behind the suave, mannerly one we have been familiar with up to now. From what he describes, gay life in Los Angeles during these years was covert yet very, very wild. He was a busy guy, both professionally and personally. His portraits of his friends, lovers, tricks, flirtations and coworkers in the film industry are vivid and viscerally engaging. When Isherwood wrote this memoir in the 1970s he no longer had any use for euphemisms and politesse and, consequently, he simply calls a three-way a three-way and says who did what to whom in what order and whether he later went back for more. What comes through loud and clear is that Isherwood loved the sex he had, and that he had no time for those suffering Saras and Sams who claimed that shame and suffering lurk behind the lure of sensuality. The body was a temple to him and he attended services every day and often more than once a day. When he set out to have fun with the boys, he had fun with the boys. When he had lunch with Garbo, he had a GREAT lunch with Garbo; and when he talked with Ava Gardner as a pal, he dedicated 100% of his attention to her. Does knowing this much intimate detail diminish Isherwood-the-writer? If anything, this brilliant, dishy and hilarious memoir deepens my regard for the Isherwood who produced the fiction classics like The Berlin Stories and A Single Man. I am in awe of his honesty.
Rating: 
Summary: Should Have Stayed "Lost."
Review: Though I read and enjoyed Christopher Isherwood's "Diaries, Volume One", I was bored by these recollections,"Lost Years, A Memoir", which were composed by him some thirty years after their occurrence. Apparently he had abandoned his daily practice of keeping a diary between the years of 1945-1951, and this is his attempt to cover those lost years. There are some mildly interesting stories here, and also includes little tid-bits about the people you'd expect it to, Garbo, Vidal, Williams....but I found it very repetitious. Also, though I am far from a prude, and am just as much of a horn-dog as anyone else, I found the very graphic description of his sexual escapades to often be tasteless and vulgar. Tennessee William's "Memoirs", for example, included many accounts of sexual situations, but they were usually recounted with such humor that it only made them very comical. Not only are many of Mr. Isherwood's sexual memories told without any comical hindsight that one could maybe even identify with, or, in fact, any sensuality, but, they are beyond bad taste. I mean, there are some things I just don't need to know. Though I respect Mr. Isherwood and his literary legacy, and know he is remembered as a good person and friend, the overly prurient, if I may use such an old fashioned word, tone of this book really turned me off. The contents of these rememberences were just not interesting enough for me to get past the self-indulgent drivel. I guess there IS such a thing as too much honesty. Sex "in your face" is a bore, and so was this book.
Rating:
Summary: Should Have Stayed "Lost."
Review: Though I read and enjoyed Christopher Isherwood's "Diaries, Volume One", I was bored by these recollections,"Lost Years, A Memoir", which were composed by him some thirty years after their occurrence. Apparently he had abandoned his daily practice of keeping a diary between the years of 1945-1951, and this is his attempt to cover those lost years. There are some mildly interesting stories here, and also includes little tid-bits about the people you'd expect it to, Garbo, Vidal, Williams....but I found it very repetitious. Also, though I am far from a prude, and am just as much of a horn-dog as anyone else, I found the very graphic description of his sexual escapades to often be tasteless and vulgar. Tennessee William's "Memoirs", for example, included many accounts of sexual situations, but they were usually recounted with such humor that it only made them very comical. Not only are many of Mr. Isherwood's sexual memories told without any comical hindsight that one could maybe even identify with, or, in fact, any sensuality, but, they are beyond bad taste. I mean, there are some things I just don't need to know. Though I respect Mr. Isherwood and his literary legacy, and know he is remembered as a good person and friend, the overly prurient, if I may use such an old fashioned word, tone of this book really turned me off. The contents of these rememberences were just not interesting enough for me to get past the self-indulgent drivel. I guess there IS such a thing as too much honesty. Sex "in your face" is a bore, and so was this book.
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