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Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History Of Wayward Authors (2013)

by Andrew Shaffer(Favorite Author)

3.54 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0062077287 (ISBN13: 9780062077288)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Harper Perennial

review 1: This was a great book. It was realistic about the horrors of the authors' addictions to drugs and alcohol while maintaining a lightheartedness that kept it funny. Shaffer succeeds at peppering in colorful phrases like "The United States had stepped, red-white-and-blue balls swinging, into the power vacuum" and "As the saying goes, it's all fun and games until someone chokes on the business end of a twelve-gauge shotgun" which have the effect of making a book mostly about depressed dead people seem contemporary and lively. If you like biography, or if you hate biographies because they're always so damn long and detailed, you may very well like this book.
review 2: This book mashed together a bunch of well-known anecdotes claiming to be something scandalous, all ... morethe while lamenting the disappearance of self-destructive authors even though the addictions and vices detailed often led to less literary output. In the conclusion, the author admits that being addicted to opium or alcohol is not a good thing, but that no one will remember you if you aren't. There are so many problems with this book that I don't want to bother diving down that hole for several thousand words. The only reason I finished it is because it's short and I'm behind on my Goodreads challenge. less

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