Publisher's Weekly Review
Winston Churchill, the great WWII British prime minister, and George Orwell, celebrated author of 1984 and Animal Farm, never met. There's no evidence that Churchill ever read a word by Orwell, and the latter never held public office. But they admired each other from afar and worked for the same purpose: to save the world from totalitarianism. Ricks (The Gamble), two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, brings the two men together in a book whose model is assumed to be Plutarch's Parallel Lives, side-by-side sketches of people whose existence never overlapped. In vivid prose, Ricks entwines the biographies of two figures who fought in strikingly different ways to achieve similar goals. What is new in this portrayal is their juxtaposition between a single book's covers, though it's unclear on what grounds Ricks chooses to do so. Other politicians roused their people; other writers warned of the Nazi and Soviet menaces. However, even if Ricks isn't convincing in his pairing of the two men, he superbly illustrates that Churchill and Orwell made enduring cases for the necessity of moral and political fortitude in the face of authoritarianism. This is a bracing work for our times. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Winston Churchill and George Orwell seem like odd allies in the cause of truth-telling, but Pulitzer Prize finalist Ricks argues that these two one an extrovert politician, the other an introverted writer were twin pillars of the struggle against the totalitarian threats of fascism and communism. They had things in common. Both blurred the line between soldier and journalist, Churchill in the Boer War, Orwell in the Spanish Civil War. Both were superb writers. Both loved England, though Churchill showed his affection by spelling out to the English just how bad things were in the early days of WWII. This grim talk did not dismay the British people. Instead, it braced them, Ricks writes. Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984, was the visionary, predicting the rise of the all-seeing state and politicians who masterfully twist the truth. His literary method was to discover the facts and lay them out, Ricks writes. 1984 has sold 50 million copies, with a burst of recent sales to readers grappling with the implications of fake news. The genius of Ricks' method is to tell the story of an ongoing struggle through the lives of two extraordinary men.--Gwinn, Mary Ann Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, by Arundhati Roy. (Vintage, $16.95.) In her first novel since her Booker Prize-winning book, "The God of Small Things," Roy explores India's political turmoil, particularly the Kashmiri separatist movement, through the lives of social outcasts. Our reviewer, Karan Mahajan, praised the story's "sheer fidelity and beauty of detail," writing that Roy the novelist has returned "fully and brilliantly intact." WHERE THE WATER GOES: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, by David Owen. (Riverhead, $16.) The Colorado is in peril. Drought, climate change and overuse are draining the river - an important source of water, electricity and food. Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, visits farms, reservoirs and power plants along its route, and considers what actions could help preserve the river. WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS, by Bethany Ball. (Grove, $16.) A financial scandal threatens to upend the branches of a Jewish family in this wry debut novel. When Marc, an Israeli transplant in Los Angeles, is implicated in a laundering scheme, the Solomons back on a Jordan River Valley kibbutz must try to make sense of the news. Balancing literary and political history, Ball renders her characters with sensitivity and strains of dark humor. MARTIN LUTHER: Renegade and Prophet, by Lyndal Roper. (Random House, $20.) A penetrating biography focuses on Luther's upbringing, religious formation and inner life as he articulated his theological arguments and grappled with fame and scrutiny. "I want to understand Luther himself," Roper, a historian at Oxford, writes of her project. "I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in a time before our modern separation of mind and body." RISE THE DARK, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/ Little, Brown, $15.99.) In Montana, a messianic leader plans to shut down a power grid that supplies electricity to half the country, with a woman taken hostage to ensure the scheme goes through. Her captor is the same man that Markus Novak, a private investigator and the central character, believes killed his wife, drawing together a painful personal reckoning and terrorist plot. SURFING WITH SARTRE: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning, by Aaron James. (Anchor, $15.95.) The author, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine, outlines the system of meaning underpinning his favorite pastime. As James writes, if he were to debate with Sartre, one of his intellectual heroes, he'd draw on the tao of surfing: its ideas about freedom, power, happiness and control.
Kirkus Review
A joint biography of two men who "led the way, politically and intellectually, in responding to the twin totalitarian threats of fascism and communism" in the mid-20th century.As dual biographies pour off the presses, authors stretch to find a suitable pair. That includes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ricks (The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, 2012, etc.), who takes an odd tack with subjects who were neither friends, colleagues, rivals, nor enemies. Nonetheless, given the author's abundant skills, readers will thoroughly enjoy the result. Since Churchill and Orwell never met, Ricks writes separate biographies and then works hard to deliver a common theme. He succeeds because these two men made cases for individual freedom better than anyone in their century. During 1940, at a time when everyone agreed that Britain's destruction was imminent, Churchill treated Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers (who were largely responsible) with respect, ordered no mass murders or arrests, and never assumed that, in this crisis and, of course, temporarily, Britain needed a touch of Nazi ruthlessness. Orwell has always been the conservatives' favorite Marxist, although he was a faithful socialist all his life. An obscure journalist until his breakthrough with Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), he hated totalitarianism in all forms but reserved special ire for the cant and fabrication that all governments employ and that his colleagues on the left accepted when it suited their beliefs. Everyone approves of Orwell's classic statement that a lie in the service of a good cause is no less despicable than in the service of a bad cause. Yet it's never caught on; our leaders routinely announce bad news as good news, and plenty of activists consider lying a useful tactic. A superb account of two men who set standards for defending liberal democracy that remain disturbingly out of reach. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
If anyone doubts that history can be drastically altered by the actions of a few individuals, they should listen to this outstanding double biography about two men who changed the course of world events. If it had not been for George Orwell and Winston Churchill and their defense of democracy when an alarming percentage of people wanted to view Adolph Hitler and Nazism in a positive light, the outcome of World War II might have been horribly different. Through the men's writings and through Churchill's orations, Ricks demonstrates that the pair fought against the tide of appeasement and recognized the evils of Hitler early enough to make a significant difference. It is rare that two distinct biographies can be told with the boldness and freshness that Ricks brings to this highly recommended audiobook, and the academic and skillful narration by James Lurie adds greatly to the its value. VERDICT All libraries would serve their patrons well by having this work in their collections. ["Sure to entertain and intrigue almost any reader": LJ 4/1/17 review of the Penguin hc.]-Joseph L. Carlson, Vandenberg Air Force Base Lib., Lompoc, CA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
