Reviews for Thackeray's Letters to an American Family

The average rating for Thackeray's Letters to an American Family based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-23 00:00:00 Jai Jhagroo The story of the youth of a happy man, who becomes successful by means of the war - from his first fan letter to GK Chesteron from at school to his friendships with Elizabeth Bowen, Stuart Hampshire, Stephen Spencer, the Felix Frankfurters, the Chaim Weizmanns - he made himself welcome and useful to most people he met, and spent an interesting war doing public diplomacy in the US, with a special remit for the Jews, blacks and other sub-groups. "I do think [Virginia Woolf:] is the most beautiful person I've ever seen. I can also imagine what she looks like when she goes mad,as I believe, she occasionally does....She is really a most godlike person whom it is a pity that anyone should know intimately." Berlin Aet. 24, 1934. Other memorable bits - a long set-piece likening the British regime in 1930s Palestine to a third rate prep school Popular boys are the Arabs - high-spirited, good at games, likely to break out at a rag; then there's Jewish House - parents give them too much spending money, unfairly work hard, rude, conceited, ugly, ostentatious , collect stamps and cheat oee another in trading them. The Masters are British officials, uncertain of their own class so likely to be snobs. There is a visit of Gerturde Stein to Balliol when she speaks with shocking clarity and good sense about complex topics having to do with Whitehead - can't you be a bit more obscure so we can boast that we've seen you, he thinks? Henry James had an insatiable appetite for vivid description of all sexual activities whatever. According to Hugh Walpole - everyone told him what they could but he could never get enough. Writing to Elizabeth Bowen on James: He is admirable but even proust, not to mention Tolstoy, Flaubert, Balzac have so much more courage - even the passe chatter of how their characters speak about "honor" saves them fro the "possessed, jittering" nature of James characters, all of whom fear that their private world may be taken away from them but which cannot be defended. The other 19c writers, and even Kafka, saw that what was lost and undefensible you could do without - even in defeat they didn't live in a consnant world of fear of defeat, becuase they could write it off. "We, the sensitivites, the intlellectuals, we who observe, are cripples," able to peer from weird angles a tthe world "but thereby depriving us of the right to life," which James and Forster only accord to normal - in EMF's case, "near Nazi" figures at the edge of the canvas. Tolstoy and the unfashionable Vicytorians were right - you can give yourself wholly and lose nothing irrecoverable. But it does not seem like Isaiah ever really did. Later, writing to Ben Nicolson from Venice, "this most unnatural town in the world," makes him remember how much he hates HJ: the city and the novelist "are not dissimilar, his characters also possess the appalling characteristic of not having anything happen to them; they have to dig, scratch for experience, to absorb and accumulate like vampires, with a perpetual haunting fear that they the stream will run dry, fall short, and worst of all, they don't live through their sought-after experience at all, they avoid. When the war started, the best remark about the war was by the wife of a Cambridge don: "The war has shown up all foreigners as such." A great portrait of AA Berle, who knew Alger Hiss was a spy and forgot to tell anyone, and is the father of Peter Berle whom many know. "A very clever man with a tortuous mind, a modest megalomaniac who has to be humored." - great portrait of FDR: The president really is very queer - not at all what you think he is. I have reached the conclusion that despite the gay and generous nature and all the manners and sweep of an old-established landowning squire he is (a) absolutely cold, (b) completely ruthless, (c) has no friends, (d) becoming a megalomaniac and is pulling our Mr Churchill along rather than vice versa. This may work out quite well as far as the world in genral is concerned, since his intentions are humane and decent, but the idea that one can trust him or look on him as a sort of Gladstone is completely false He does not like the rich, it is true, but neither does he like the poor or really anyone. …His wife is the opposite in every respect, a sentimental, gushing, heavy liberal, with a great deal of native shrewdness which the very ugly often develop.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-17 00:00:00 Sam Trachtenberg Fun! Reading Mr. Berlin's letters to his parents and friends... An example of a way we wish we all could write. It's good for you.