Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill: A Brief Account of a Long Life

Contrary to one previous reviewer, who clearly wrote his hasty review during a commercial break on Fox, this is a brilliant primer on Churchill- for those who have read every book, it poses a series of provocative questions about the man behind the icon and for those who haven't read a word, this is a great place to start. For conservatives and liberals alike, a scintillating examination of one of the most important men of the modern era. Must be all that hot air in Scottsdale...

Gretchen Rubin favors her readers with an honest presentation of Winston Churchill and reveals how biographical authors use their own interpretations to "spin" facts to suit their own ends. She also clearly reveals her own opinions when she expresses them. She presents Churchill "warts and all" but his greatness shines through. Forty Ways is a fun and refreshing way to view one of history's greatest characters.

Churchill is an inspiring figure, and seems surprisingly relevant today, perhaps because of 9/11, but also because he lived life so fully and overcame so many setbacks.This book is a surprisingly fresh complement to Churchill biographies. By dividing Churchill's life into a number - 40 - issues, it lets the author examine the tiles in the mosaic that is Churchill. She also has a thesis - that Churchill's life is a literally classic "tragedy" - which is a unifying and stimulating concept.I really liked the book.

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.

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.