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All the King's Men |
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| Author: Robert Penn Warren Published: 1996-09-01 |
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List price: $13.00 Our price: $4.99 |
Usually ships in 24 hours As of: January 07th, 2009 03:35:55 PM |
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Customer comments on this selection. Don't Make 'em Like This AnymoreThis American classic and Pulitzer winner is wonderful and absolutely worth reading if you like your books to have depth and girth and that they be truly literary instead of merely entertaining for the plane ride, the beach, et al. Nothing wrong with that, if you do. Warren's a literal poet, and there are jaw-dropping turns of phrase on nearly every page. The reason I give a 4 and not a 5 is because it is at times (often, actually) overwritten, overwrought and purple as hell and there's too much time spent in Jack's head reflecting, thinking and philosophizing for my taste. But these are gorgeous flaws and, in the end, I found the writing too good to worry about the fact that there's too much of it. Also, the novel-within-the-novel regarding Cass Mastern was not needed and really dragged the already slagging story to a halt. The book did not need that background, per se, but it is what it is. It ain't a breathless thriller. It's hundreds of thousands of words of shimmering prose. Tap in and drink it with relish. They just don't make them like this anymore. Why? Because no house would publish it because they know nobody will read it in the numbers necessary to make it remotely profitable. Books are products; books must show sales growth potential or they get snuffed out. Sixty years ago, before the world 'o screens we live in now, this book was fodder for actual conversations at the proverbial water cooler. Now it's mostly seen as a "book to read before you die" or something inane like that, like climbing El Capitan or something. Sad really. -- If you are a reader, read it. If you are a dabbler who wants only something to pass the time, and that's no crime, then you don't want to bother.  Why did I wait?I was assigned this book in an undergrad political science class. I began it and didn't finish it--I suppose because of immaturity. Thirty years later I decided to give it another try. In short, this is one of the best novels I've read, and one of the few books that I want to re-read. A Great Book Read By A Great VoiceAccidentally picking this up at the library in the audio book section, I gave the first CD a listen and was hooked throughout all 18 CD's in this large, vast and powerful read. All The King's Men was originally pulped in 1946 by Robert Penn Warren, and it is a tale about the corruption of a powerful man I have to get really geeky here and talk about some pop TV for a second. The character Benjamin Linus on ABC's Lost is played by Michael Emerson is one of my favorite TV characters of all time. I was pleased to find out that All The King's Men, the audio book version is read by none other than the Michael Emerson. And since the story is told in first person, Emerson becomes the central charaacter of the story, Jack Burden. There was a movie made recently based on this book, and Burden was played by Jude Law, I believe, and the movie tanked. I'll tell you why it tanked, because Emerson didn't play Jack Burden. His voice and inflection are perfect and it would be hard to imagine no other as the character because Emerson embodies Burden so well, simply by audio. Imagine what he could do on the big screen. That being said, let me tell you how awesome this book was. Coming at it from a point where I knew nothing of the story, it was a great trip into mind of Burden. Burden is a news reporter who, as a young man, gets hooked up with Willie Stark, a politician on the rise who begins his career as a straight shooter, someone even Lincoln would be proud of. But as the story goes on, flashing back and forth from the past to the present, making the book feel timeless and move quickly despite its length, we find Stark turning into the thing we feared he would become most, a politician. Stark's rise and downfall are chronicled by Burden, who tells how his past and present life mix in and blend together with Starks, touching at all points. Burden's thoughts and comments about life and the goings on in the story are often pessimistic and hopeless, and that's perhaps what this book does so well, in that it eventually saves Jack Burden but allows Stark to fall off the deep end, and not a page too late for either. Warren can write southern dialect with the best of them: McCarthy, Faulkner, and the conversations in the book feel real and genuine. Nothing reads so good as some southern fried dialog. This book is deep and touches on many aspects of life: parenthood, death, pride, love, loss of love, philosophy, history, and politics. The characters are singular, and I don't think we'll see another Jack Burden in literature for a long time--someone so callused on the outside but vulnerable as well, with quick wit, a lack of regard for any authority, and one who eventually admits he was wrong about everything. I loved this book, and will read it again in the future. If you are a fan of audio books, you must do this one in your ears. I never experienced a better experience with a narrator than I did with Emerson's Burden. Pick it up, and enjoy. great literature, sinfully deliciousI read the 1963 edition by Time Inc. This 600 page book is an incredible read, an extremely well written page turner, very visual writing with colorful chanracters that are so real and alive. The book is filled with intriguing events but so skillfully layered and woven with seamless transitions into monologues by the narrator about his reflections on life, history, good and evil, and many more. This is the best book I have read this year so far. The Web Of ThingsI put off reading this novel for almost twenty years from when it was first recommended to me for the simple reason that I dismissed as a "political" novel and, ergo, not of the first water. - How wrong can a prospective reader be?!? - To begin, this is not a "political" novel, per se, and the character of Willie Stark, as compared with the odyssey of Jack Burden, not very gripping. As another reviewer has mentioned, it is only political in the way that Oedipus Rex is political. What All The King's Men is, then, is a beautiful, hauntingly poetic, dark reflection on man's state in the world. It is an authentic American, modernist tragedy. And, like all great works of literature, it resonates in one's mind and heart long after the last page is read and the covers closed. The other reviewers have covered the plots and subplots, so that there doesn't seem much to add save, that, for me, the most engrossing sections were Jack's accounts of his two journeys into the past, one to find "truth", the other to find "the facts" and his deeply poetic rendering of the development of his adolescent love for Anne Stanton, which comes as close to Proustian as anything else in literature. I suppose I would go on to add a caveat here too. As I say, despite the book's somewhat pacific ending, the work is a tragedy, with the accompanying dark Weltanschauung inherent in an authentic tragedy. There are so many passages I could quote to exemplify this perspective to let the reader know what s/he is getting into here, but the best comes at the end of the fourth chapter, after Jack's first dive into the past: "Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping." In other words, beware of trying to trip the light fantastic through this powerful novel. |
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