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Isherwood
A Life Revealed
by Peter Parker
English writer Christopher Isherwood, who is most famous for his book Berlin Stories which later inspired the musical Cabaret, is profiled by London-based biographer Peter Parker.
Random House, 832 pages
12/07/2004
$39.95
ISBN: 1400062497
Nonfiction
Biographies & Memoirs
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Library Journal Anthony J. Pucci
The most comprehensive examination of Christopher Isherwood to date. [1 Dec 2004, p.118]
The New Republic David Thomson
Not even a long review can properly convey the pleasures of this book. Parker writes very well, with a dry humor that brings Isherwood's balloon to earth. Does the book deserve its length? I kept promising myself that I would do some judicious skimming here and there, but I could not: Parker is too skillful for that, too faithful to the material, and to the gossipy appeal of Isherwood. The detail is immense.
Boston Globe James Sallis
The man Isherwood and the writer Isherwood, multitudinous aspects and facets of both, are here. [2 Jan 2005, p.C9]
Publishers Weekly
With the final installment of Isherwood's voluminous diaries yet to be published, Parker's biography, written with full access to his subject's papers, will likely remain definitive.
Booklist Brad Hooper
The narrative is extremely detailed, but it presents all the more complete a picture. [1 Nov 2004, p.454]
San Francisco Chronicle Martin Rubin
Happily, in Parker's exhaustive, consistently intelligent book, we have a wealth of detail and interpretation that not only bring Isherwood's own indelible self-portraits into sharper focus, but even deepen them.
The New York Times Book Review Brooke Allen
Parker has written a fine biography because he admires Isherwood for the right reasons and feels free to express disapproval of his many faults... And in the end Peter Parker, too, after hundreds of pages of caviling, finally lets affection trump censoriousness and gives in to his subject's famous charm.
The New Yorker Hilton Als
[Parker provides] careful, fresh readings of Isherwood’s published works and his unpublished diaries, and conduct[s] numerous interviews with his friends and contemporaries. He is undoubtedly a more reliable narrator than Isherwood, and is never shy about expressing his frustration with his subject’s delusions and selective memory.
Washington Post Jim Marks
While students of Isherwood will welcome the wealth of information contained here, the general reader might regret that Parker didn't follow Isherwood's "iron question which I try to live by as a writer: Why are you telling me this?"
Los Angeles Times Peter Stansky
Often, however, in the reading of [this] book, one asks, was it necessary to share quite so much with the reader? Interesting as it is in Parker's to have several paragraphs of biography as a new person enters the story, all of them may not be needed. [19 Dec 2004, p.R6]
LA Weekly David Ehrenstein
For while... Parker has done a reasonably good job of confecting a catalogue raisonné of Isherwood’s life, putting its multifarious events in some semblance of order, it's the books to which one must return to read the real story, and through them, the story of gay life in Los Angeles.
Kirkus Reviews
Although he has bravely plunged into the forest of Isherwood documentation, Parker sometimes loses his way through sheer inclusiveness, citing his subject's every quarrel and patch-up with his widowed mother, troubled brother, and lovers.
Atlantic Monthly Thomas Mallon
The book gets off to an excruciatingly slow start, with inventory substituting for description, and detail for meaning. Every time the reader begins to walk across an apparent narrative fairway, some minor character's CV is there to spring up like a rake handle and thump him on the forehead. But in a strange defiance of literary physics the enterprise gains pace and pith as it goes along.
 The average user rating for this book is 0.0 (out of 10) based on 0 User Votes
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