The man: his oratorical magnetism, theatricality, and biting sense of humor... it's all here, in swallowable nuggets, but packing gobs of vitamins and minerals.

This is probably the best INTRODUCTION to one of the most fascinating figures in the history of mankind.
Some people will (and did) complain that this book is not "substantial" or "exhaustive". Please ignore them: they are the same "unfun" people who like to exhaust themselves and others by seeing all of life as one big never-ending PhD dissertation; and who insist on listening to, and passing judgment on, EVERY recording of Mahler and Bruckner. (YAWN...&... ffffart.)

The format chosen by the author will greatly help the younger generation nurtured on Matrix, X-Box and iPOD to enter into the non-virtual world: the world of REAL blood, REAL sweat, and REAL tears.

Most of the 40 vignettes are composed by juxtaposing a pair of views that contradict each other. This way structuring the narrative may come off as clever or gimmicky to some, but I found it to be a fun, fascinating, and even necessary way to show how there is no such thing as incontestable truth in biography; and by extension, in History -- with a big H. Indeed, this book shopws how History and the lives/values of those who shape it are ultimately not something that lived and died in the past but thrives in the contest of passions and interests of those that are living now.

This book gives the reader a generous gamut of contradicting views culled from different bigraphies of the man. Thus the reader who is just learning about Churchill and his time will be better prepared to read, BUT strengthened to resist being completely taken in by, whatever tendentiousness that might exist even in the more substantial and penetrating analyses.

Take it as a guidebook, and go on this fun tour.

Here's a little something:

Upon hearing that a captured German general was to eat dinner with the pompous Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, Churchill confided: "I sympathize with General von Thoma. Defeated, humiliated, in captivity... and now, dinner with Montgomery ."

(Churchill) once characterized Montgomery :
"Indomitable in retreat; invincible in advance; insufferable in victory."

I thoroughly enjoyed this book because it allowed me to read about Churchill without being drowned by extraneous facts, battle details and drawn out war discussions. This format offers 40 "Thoughts" about Churchill and even manages to play devil's advocate. It is perfect for a reader who wants to understand his complex character without being overloaded by biographical facts.

Finally, someone wrote a biography of Churchill that didn't require a 6 month commitment. I have always wanted to read a biography of Churchill but they were all soooo darn long. Gilbert, Manchester, Jenkins.....the shortest is over 1 million pages long!!! (Okay, a bit of an exaggeration). 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is the first Churchill biography to come along that can be read without having to quit your job to finish it. The format is unique and enjoyable. 40 very brief chapters that each cover his life from a different angle. The book is also an enlightening exposition on the biography genre itself. It was a very easy read. Many reviewers have complained that it is disjointed, superficial, gimmicky, repetitive, and/or self-contradictory. Some of those points are valid. I'll briefly address these one by one:
1)Disjointed: Necessary given the format
2)Superficial: Okay, then go read one of the 1000+ pagers.
3)Gimmicky: I rather like the "40 ways" format
4)Repetitive: True. That's why I gave 4 stars instead of 5
5)Self-contradictory: This is deliberately done to show how the same set of facts can yield entirely opposing conclusions. I think this is one of the book's best attributes. It doesn't arrive at artificially certain conclusions like other biographies tend to do. True to its title, it shows the different ways to look at his life (he's a drunk/he's not a drunk, he was a natural leader/he wasn't, etc).

In short, you may be disappointed if you re a Churchill buff but I recommend it if you just want a taste of who he was. It's an entertaining, well-written, easy to read book (if not comprehensive).

Finally, someone wrote a biography of Churchill that didn't require a 6 month commitment. I have always wanted to read a biography of Churchill but they were all soooo darn long. Gilbert, Manchester, Jenkins.....the shortest is over 1 million pages long!!! (Okay, a bit of an exaggeration). 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is the first Churchill biography to come along that can be read without having to quit your job to finish it. The format is unique and enjoyable. 40 very brief chapters that each cover his life from a different angle. The book is also an enlightening exposition on the biography genre itself. It was a very easy read. Many reviewers have complained that it is disjointed, superficial, gimmicky, repetitive, and/or self-contradictory. Some of those points are valid. I'll briefly address these one by one:
1)Disjointed: Necessary given the format
2)Superficial: Okay, then go read one of the 1000+ pagers.
3)Gimmicky: I rather like the "40 ways" format
4)Repetitive: True. That's why I gave 4 stars instead of 5
5)Self-contradictory: This is deliberately done to show how the same set of facts can yield entirely opposing conclusions. I think this is one of the book's best attributes. It doesn't arrive at artificially certain conclusions like other biographies tend to do. True to its title, it shows the different ways to look at his life (he's a drunk/he's not a drunk, he was a natural leader/he wasn't, etc).

In short, you may be disappointed if you re a Churchill buff but I recommend it if you just want a taste of who he was. It's an entertaining, well-written, easy to read book (if not comprehensive).

I was well on my way to reading "everything" about and by Churchill by the time I came across this wise and wholly admirable book. The magnitude of Churchill's life and times, and the tragic figure he cut--tragic in the full Greek sense of all that is necessary to constitute true tragedy--can create among some people an almost insatiable appetite for details. I would have to be counted among them. Frankly, I thought this book might make an interesting "snack" between the stack of Churchill books I'd just read and the stack I was about to. Instead I found that 40 ways... was a full course meal. What the author has accomplished is much more substantial than I would have thought possible in such a slim (for Churchill anyway) volume. You recognize that an individual's greatest strength must necessarily be the source of their greatness weakness, a self portrait reflected in a double edged sword, so to speak. I was impressed by the case she made that the times he lived in floodlight these strengths and weaknesses to further define him, and because there was greatness in Churchill, to help define the very times in which he lived.

I was perhaps skeptical that this reduction and summation, pro/con approach would prove to be "gimmicky" or perhaps a shortcut to a more scholarly undertaking. Now I feel that the "gimmick" was instead an apt and inspired construct for examining an enormously complex thing. (It's a methodology that would be useful to apply to FDR, among others). To Rubin's credit she hasn't used this format to avoid judgment, but to elongate the period of consideration before judgment. I've read enough about the man to have done very well on the true/false test, but I still spent a long time pondering the several questions I got wrong. The test reminded me again that the complexities of his life are almost beyond my ability to assimilate them. Hence the fascination I suppose.

Some years ago I was very impressed and moved by a biography of Brahms written by Jan Swafford. Swafford makes the point early that Brahms had been very fortune in both the timeframe he was borne into and in the timeframe of his death. Swafford's take was that the music world of Vienna changed immensely after 1897 and it had been Brahms' good fortune not to live to see it. I was struck at the time by looking at lives that way and Rubin makes a similar and equally valid point about Churchill in her book. He was unlucky to have outlived his time and was in a sense victimized by the nearly indestructible constitution that had served his so well for the first 70 years. There is no shortage of first-hand accounts of Churchill's flirtations with real danger. He was well aware of the historical advantage he might have had if he perished under heroic circumstances. He also enjoyed the adrenal rush these occasions afforded him. Of these accounts, none is better than the biography of his personal bodyguard of approximately twenty years, Walter Thompson, "Beside the Bulldog". More on his book at the close.*


I noted with special interest the author's mediation on the subjectivity of biographers and the essential criteria she establishs for evaluating a life. Her comments on Manchester's "knowing insight" into a single photo of Churchill's mother illustrate the need for caution before you make a commitment to a particular version of Churchill's story and the thousands of pages that may go with it. Rubin has done a service to readers and biographers both, clarified the task for writers to come and possibly even established some ground rules. While the sales numbers for this book (and I've no idea what they are) may not suggest broad influence, I'm confident that the methodology used will have larger ramifications for a future generation of biographers. Would-be great writers long for a subject through which they can imbue their own greatness. This process of subverting one large ego for the other, a process that can subsume many years of the writer's life is full of temptations and seduction. It's almost inevitably that the writer's own feelings influence what gets exposed and what gets tidied up. The end product edges towards a symbiosis of the subject's life and the particular aspects of that life that speak to the author's own experience and or fascinations. By comparison, Rubin's approach in this book feels free of artifice. It's the case where not spending a dozen years of your life on a single project is actually a good thing, not just for the author but for the book as well.

(For Churchill fans, my favorite first-hand account of his life is Walter Thompson's (to be re-released in print in late 2007). If you haven't read this former Scotland Yard detectives' account of the near twenty years he spent by Churchill's side than you have missed a great treat, for nowhere else does Churchill live and breathe as tangibly as in these pages.

Thompson joined up with Churchill around 1918 and stayed with him through the end of WW 2. There were some years during the 1930's that Thompson was assigned elsewhere, but he did accompany Churchill to the US during the Al Capone years of the 1930's and was there when Churchill was hit by a car crossing against traffic in NYC. He was by Churchill's side during many of the secret FDR meetings, on ship and at The White House for Christmas. His take on things goes a long way towards answering many of the questions your book raises, though of course, Thompson hide things as well, both about Churchill, himself and the harsh treatment he received from Mrs. Churchill, who resented his constant presence to the extent that she frequently refused to feed Thompson while assuring her husband that arrangements had been made for him. Thompson's take on FDR, though only a small part of this book will interest historians. Thompson's displays a vivid command of the language, considerable wit, and more uniquely, he conveys an unusually keen sense of place. Marry those talents with his genius for sketching characters with deft precision and you get a compelling book. The panorama of Egypt, Morocco and the Gaza Strip, (eerily unchanged) circa 1920 are but a few locations that unfold before the eye. Add laying bricks next to Churchill at Chartwell, carrying Churchill's paintings materials throughout the world, (most notably in Marrakech and France), meeting Mussolini, dodging shrapnel on rooftops during the blitz and Thompson's fascinating and very favorable account of T.E. Lawrence (which led me to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom)and you've got an account unlike any other. The book Churchill's Bodyguard by Thomas Hickman will be re-released this fall. He substitutes Thompson's exceptional prose with his own dry and rather academic voice and while Hickman's account fills in the storyline for Thompson's own complicated life, it's not a substitute for the original).

I bought this book while I was writing a book of my own in which Churchill is a central figure. I wanted new insights on the man, and listening to the author on a radio talk show, I thought she might be able to provide those for me. I was sadly disappointed when I started reading the book.

The title comes from the fact that Rubin offers 40 exceptionally brief chapters (3 to 5 pages in length) that offer a different "perspective" on Churchill. The idea probably sound very good and innovative as a book proposal, but it is such a shallow account that the reader can be excused for feeling deceived. Chapter three is nothing more than a listing of people Churchill met during his life. Chapter fourteen is nothing other than a listing of facts about the man in bullet format. Each chapter as three complete sentences. Another chapter is a collection of quotes from him and another about him.

I spent good hard earned money on this book, if you choose to read this book I suggest you borrow it from the library instead.

This book is a good way to get a fresh look (forty of them) at Churchill, but not a good way to approach him if you are starting from scratch. It's not a conventional biography - read at least an encyclopedia article first. The author captures different angles of his life in each chapter, using a variety of techniques. I found it an engaging read and recommend it to anyone who wants to think about Churchill or sort the facts in one's head. I won't spoil what I thought was the most interesting way to look at Churchill suggested by Rubin...

It is the lot of great men and women to be entombed in biographies the size of the Lenin Mausoleum. And when sub-biographers turn their hand to popularizations one gets, well, sub-biography; the standard judgments taken from the big biographies but in too brief a compass to give the reader much sense of the subject of the biography beyond the biographer's predilections. One way out is through a cutaway like John Lukacs' superb Five Days in London. Another is through the lens of a skilled and constantly shifting pararazza like Gretchen Rubin, who excels in delivering a biographical portrait that is digestible for those with less than Proustian appetites for bulk, but is very far from a "popular" biography.

Someone has distinguished between the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, and the simplicity on the far side. I'm in no doubt where Forty Ways to look at Winston Churchill is to be found.

Nigel Cameron

I'm a big fan of biographies, and have read hundreds of them over the years. This one ranks perhaps tops on my list. Rubin not only provides perspective on the differing views of Churchill's life and character, but also deconstructs, in witty fashion, the entire discipline of biography. I was also amused by how Rubin jumped right into topics like sex and booze that other, more hagiographic Churchill biographers delicately avoided. About the only tiny mistep in Rubin's narrative is when she hinted that the great Gandhi was a better man than Churchill. G. B. Singh's "Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity" instead shows that Gandhi himself would have also been a worthy subject of Rubin's perceptive gaze.

This is definitely the best biography I ever read. Its fragmented structure affords readers the chance to find the answers to questions that interest them most, or to skip around if they so choose. Ms. Rubin also comments on the very nature of biography and how each biographer paints a different picture of their subject by choosing which facts to include and which to ignore. Her writing is very descriptive and vivid. This is one of those books that is such a pleasure to read that you'll wish there were more pages after you turn the last one.

Reading time is precious.

So much has been written on Churchill. This question is what to read and where to start?
This book will give you an overall look at the man and the myth of Winston Churchill.

To me this book was like listening to an old friend discussing Winston Churchill.

Well worth the time.