Reviews for Saint Francis of Assisi: A Biography

The average rating for Saint Francis of Assisi: A Biography based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-11-17 00:00:00 Steve Grier 'A book about literary estates has to be about many other things as well: about changing notions of posterity, about copyright law, publishing, the rise of English Studies, the onset of literary celebritism. Principally, or so I discovered as I wrote, it has to be about biography, the history and ethics of. How much should a biographer tell? How much should an executor suppress? And what would the biographee have wanted -- do we know?' In this book, published in 1992, Ian Hamilton offered 22 biographical English case studies contained within sixteen chapters. Those chapters are entitled: John Donne the Younger Surviving Shakespeare Be Kind to My Remains: Marvell, Milton, Dryden Pope's Bullies Boswell's Colossal Hoard The Frailties of Robert Burns Byron and the Best of Friends At the Shelley Shrine John Forster, of Dickens Fame Froude's Carlyle, Carlyle's Froude Keeping House: Tennyson and Swinburne Legends and Mysteries: Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James Remembering Rupert Brooke Authorised Lives: Hardy and Kipling James Joyce's Patron Saint Provisional Posterities: Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin The book is filled with interesting anecdotes and (for me at least) little known facts about a number of literary figures I admire. But while learning about John Donne the Younger’s whipping of the eight year old Humphry Dunt (who died two weeks later) and Sir William Davenant’s pox-rotted nose, I wondered about the boundaries of biography. How do these facts change how we think about these people? What about James Joyce, and his ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver? Do these interesting facts about the lives of publicly known figures influence what we think of (and how we value) their work? Where does privacy begin, and end? Is fifty years long enough (or too long) to embargo sensitive material about the lives of literary figures? In addition to privacy, Ian Hamilton was also concerned about literary estates and published literature as property. What happens after published literature ceases to be private property and enters the public domain? Who owns what? What is ownership? Reading through these case studies, I kept thinking about how I’d answer some of these questions. Unfortunately, I came to no fixed or firm conclusions. As a reader I like to know as much as I can, as a family member I’d want to protect, as a biographer I’d want to write, and I certainly wouldn’t wish to be a literary executor. Biography has certainly evolved over the past five hundred years – biographers now seem far more critical. This book was first published in 1992, less than a decade before Ian Hamilton’s death. I’ve yet to read his biography of Robert Lowell, or his memoir about trying to write an unauthorised life of J D Salinger. Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Review # 2 was written on 2008-01-21 00:00:00 Even McCormack this was a well written biography.I knew some things about Noel Coward, but not a lot. This was well researched and written.