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

This work encourages the reader to consider Churchill's life--and by extension, the life of any person about whom a biography is written--in terms of how characters are depicted in fiction. This is a brilliant insight. A biographer selects from many facts available about the subject, and often brings a positive or negative attitude about the subject. In this, they are little different from a novelist building up a protagonist or an antagonist.Rubin admires Churchill and has a positive outlook on him. Yet she is well aware of revisionist biographies of him, and unsavory aspects of his life. She dispassionately displays both sides in this short book. To her great credit, because the comparisons are never very long, the reader is not left throwing their hands in the air and saying, "I can't tell *what* to think about Churchill!" Rubin's very point is that, though they share certain features with fictional heroes (and villains), real lives are complicated and are not purely good or purely despicable. She gets this point across without much ado or tiring the reader.At the beginning the book seemed as if it might be similar to what I think of as the "modern style" of lay historical books--informal, and not very profound (despite what the description on Amazon seemed to foretell). But very slowly, by about #12 or so, I began grasping what she was about. She got more and more into character, aspects of the novel, looking at classical tragedy. By the end I was swept off my feet by the profundity and uniqueness of the approach, which I felt had succeeded brilliantly.I had read other biographies of Churchill, both admiring and revisionist. I felt I was able to grasp *both* the "admirable" and the "not-so-admirable" Churchill, so that the author's (and my own) finally coming down in favor of Churchill, warts and all, was done in a perfectly clear-eyed manner.You will find out nearly as much about how stories work (the construction of character, goals, setting, and plot which is the very stuff of narrative) as you will about Churchill's life. This two-for-one is a surprise and a delight, and I heartily recommend it to you.

Thousands of pages have been written and thousands of pictures have been taken. We know all that there ever was to know about John Kennedy, right? Wrong! Once again Gretchen Rubin is teaching us something about a 20th Century Icon. As with Churchill in her previous book, countless works have been written about Kennedy that have discussed his accomplishments and dissected his personality. Rubin has once again masterfully put it all in one book. She has an enjoyable writing style and objectivity that is found in few biographers. She is a master of understanding human complexity and putting her protagonist in the context of the time that he lived. One of the most fascinating aspects of this book and her other works is that she understands that most larger than life figures work on their image constantly. For Kennedy, much of his career was about brand management. Rubin tells us what was real about the man and what he and his advisers created in their brand laboratory. Kennedy springs to life, you can feel his energy, his contradictions, the pressure that his father put on him. You can feel his physical pain and his pathos. JFK's sense of elegance, his style, his ability to respond to pressure, she captures it all.What affected me most about this book was that for all of his privilege, Kennedy had a feeling for the poor, and they felt it. The Civil Rights Movement was already in full gear, but he legitimized it with the power of the presidency. Years ago, when I was in the Bronx visiting my little brother's apartment (little as in the Big Brother Program), his mom had President Kennedy's picture on top of her ancient TV. I asked her why. She said that "He and his brother Bobby wanted better lives for all of us, they were the first whites to really stick up for us." Whether or not that was true it always fascinated me that there was a feeling like that out there about a man who grew up with so much privilege. Gretchen Rubin nailed it in her book as to why. I would rather not give you the reason in this review. Go out and buy the book and enjoy it as much as I did.Gretchen, why 40 ways? It seems the perfect number of angles in your objective prism to examine a life. I look forward to your next subject.

Churchill was a heroic figure who lived to be 90, and that makes it difficult to find a short book about him. He was a prolific writer with himself as a favorite topic, and both his admirers and his detractors spun out many thick tomes trying to explain him. But I was planning a trip to London and wanted a simple introduction, nothing more. This book was just the ticket. Rubin's concise chapters are well-researched, and each addresses an issue for which Churchill was well known. Often this was done by juxtaposing conflicting points of view: Suited to high office or not? A good husband and parent or too preoccupied elsewhere? An incomparable visionary or hopeless alcoholic? Other chapters took on not a question but a fact: He loved to paint. He suffered from bouts of depression. He spent money freely. He was surpassingly eloquent. He believed in the British Empire and cherished its history. He would do whatever was needed to do to save his country. Using this mosaic approach, Rubin was able to assemble a coherent picture of this remarkable man, one that bore up well when I got to England and was able to visit the Britain at War exhibit, Churchill's war rooms, and the very modern museum devoted to him there. Having posed the essential details, Rubin concludes her account by offering her own judgment of the man and the result comes off as being "just enough."

On one hand, quite light and an easy read, but still crammed full of interesting information. Very thought provoking.I learned so much about one of modern history's great figures. Highly recommended !

I have read a few Churchill biographies as well as some of his own writing, but I found Gretchen Rubin's her "forty ways" pulled me in with a fresh, balanced and thought-provoking approach to consider a giant of 20th-century history. A great read.

As a Churchill admirer this was helpful. The book points out both the good and the bad others see in Churchull in a balanced thoughtful way. Suggests once again that no one's perfect - but in this case the man was huge an indispensible to his times. An easy and enjoyable read.

Great perspectives

A great way to look at Curchill. Covers the pros and cons. Tries to get to the bottom of his motivation. . . his regard for Britain's past.