Reviews for General Sir Arthur Currie A Military Biography

The average rating for General Sir Arthur Currie A Military Biography based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-25 00:00:00 Joshua Kenney Phew, this tome gets rather bogged down in the minutae of MS Eliot's life. Quite interesting reading, but I might not have the time/courage to finish it completely. I didn't read every page of this work, and I don't plan to either. I'll rate it a 3, nevertheless. I found it too long-winding and focused on minatue to be really useful for my purposes. It's more useful to those who are really really very interested in every single small detail of Eliot's personal life. I was looking for something a bit more focused on her scholarly influences, and while this is indeed interwoven into the text, I found it quite a job to try and condense what I needed from all the other domestic and social details. Let's put this on my "skimmed" list. :)

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-21 00:00:00 Claire Vanblarcom I can't believe I read the whole thing! I had to keep plowing through to get to the end when she writes Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, my two favorite Eliot novels. After recently reading another insanely long biography of Henry James, I find it interesting that although Eliot achieved the financial success and widespread fame that proved elusive for James most of his life, the old adage "more money more problems" rings true. Eliot was by no means happy, although she comes across as devastatingly charming. Your favorite friend who is the life of the party yet also a horrid hypochrondiac. Victorian times weren't easy on the ladies: especially if you wanted a divorce. But the class divide was the most striking: Eliot worked her way up from a middle class background into the company of lords and viscounts and all that but she was a major exception to the rule. You were pretty much screwed if you were lower class, with her semi-contemporary and fellow celebrity Dickens being the other major exception to that rule. Things would be different if she was born later for sure, but she was a "man" of her time. I was really struck with the backwards nature of medicine in the mid nineteenth century that really failed someone with kidney problems like George. I do agree with one form of treatment however: "As prescribed by Paget to cleanse out her system, she was to drink a pint of champagne every day, which perhaps kept her slightly tipsy." Now there's a cleanse I can get down with.