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

I first encountered Gretchen Rubin through her blog The Happiness Project. This was during a time when I was thoroughly depressed and needed all the advice I could get. The blog explores the small and large things a person can do in order to feel happier. Rubin makes an engaging blogger; a Yalie lawyer who clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor, she approaches the main problem of philosophy with the brio and curiosity of an inveterate note-taker. ("Zoinks, I love to take notes," she writes. Any woman who combines curiosity with a vocabulary that includes the word "zoinks" is okay by me.)

Rubin has written a couple of hodgepodgey books, one of which I just finished: Forty Ways of Looking at Winston Churchill. This book forsakes the dull show more chronological march of the typical biography to present the reader with multiple glimpses and viewpoints of the ultimate British bulldog. The result is delightful, says I. It is also meta-biographical, since, by juxtaposing different versions of Churchill, Rubin reveals the ways in which biographies always reveal only certain sides of their subjects.

Churchill (as the author delightedly notes) lived a life that would have seemed incredible in fiction. His outsize personality, endless string of accomplishments, frequent quotability, and (oh yeah) the fact that he almost single-handedly saved Western Civilization from Hitler...they all make him too vivid to be real, yet he was. If you want to read about him, and I think you should, start here. show less

An intruiging take at a biography of a very odd man. Aimed at, I would say, a freshman-in-college level audience, Rubin breaks up the story of Chruchill into 40 short chapters. In addition to hopping around Churchill's life, recounting his speeches and his oddities, she attempts to deconstruct the notion of a biography by writing parts of chapters from radically different points of view, some of them personal, some of them conflicting. Although occasionally repetative and not always 100% successful, the result is in some ways a more balanced biography than a much longer volume. In terms of content, though, it is rather thin, so think of this book as an appetizer rather than a main course.

A good book giving you a sense of the many sideds to the man and his times. I am not an real fan of biography but this was short and by approaching from 40 angles you get close to a 360 view. I think the idea of 40 ways to view a subject is great and beats a linear approach. It also allows for complexity and contradiction - something I prefer rather than someone having a "take" on a character either positive or critical. The only critisism is that the author's heart did not seem to be in the "anti" Churchill chapters - they were a bit mechanical or essay like - perhaps fair enough given that it is pretty hard to be convincing given Chirchill was fighting Hitler and that the war was in fact won.

Entertaining. Rubin's JFK book is better.