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Johnson's Life Of London: The People Who Made The City That Made The World (2011)

by Boris Johnson(Favorite Author)

3.88 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0007418930 (ISBN13: 9780007418930)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

HarperTorch

review 1: Boris Johnson’s ‘Life of London’ bears many of the hallmarks of the public persona of the Mayor of London himself. It’s jumping from one important figure to another rather than acting as a biography of the city makes it disjointed, a little unwieldy, slightly unpredictable, possibly ill-advised.Closer inspection, however, reveals that details of the city’s history are there in abundance, if fleetingly and with more of an eye for how the past felt than how it can be described.. Amidst the stories of the lives of such giants as Samuel Johnson, Hadrian, Alfred the Great, and others lie the details of the social, economic, and political state of the city. Johnson’s work flows as the Thames, freezing only here and there to concentrate on a particular scandal or tri... moreumph.What Boris does best – in his writings as well as professionally – is to passionately love his country and its capital. Yet it is this very affection which either blinds him to fact or forces platitudes and propaganda from him. He is a politician, and many are the times when politicians push themselves to delight their audiences with popular falsehoods. Of all the British demigods of whom no politician can afford to offend the memory, Winston Churchill must surely be the greatest. Johnson launches into the usual sycophantic banality early on, regaling the reader with tales of how Churchill had warned in 1934 of how Hitler’s air force needed to be carefully planned for, etc. While nobody would seek to deny that Churchill was a great war leader, let us not forget that Churchill’s staggering economic incompetence - - featuring such ‘great’ decisions as pegging Britain to the gold standard at all, let alone pegging it at a highly uncompetitive rate - did nothing to guide the continent through the troubled waters of the post-crash, pre-war era. When th author talks about the ‘indiscriminate sadism’ of the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign, the mind drifts to what Churchill ordered done to Hamburg and Dresden.Yet Johnson’s inability to criticise Churchill does not prevent him from speaking plainly about where the war was won. El Alamein, he declares, was not the turning point we Brits have always claimed; Dunkirk was not the triumph taught in our schools; the war was won at Stalingrad by Soviet troops prepared to be torn to shreds. Boris even quotes Churchill as saying that the average Tommy was soft. This is not the writing of a man whose love of London and of his country is an attempt to propel himself further into the limelight that a bid for Prime Ministership may follow.To the end, Johnson’s Life of London is complex because it has been manufactured thus. It is entertaining, informative, informal. It is delightful, capable of seriousness, and yet it leaps from one period to another almost as if it cannot concentrate on one issue for longer than a few pages: it flits, boring with one topic as another darts into view. In short it is, like its author, entertaining, if not to be taken too seriously. Or is it?
review 2: The history of London, told in interludes nominally centered around individual Londoners, a la Boris. In typical his usual fashion he's quite upfront about his biases and views, so if you already know that he's not your cup of tea, don't bother- this version of London history is very Boris and unabashedly Tory. (Samuel Johnson, father of compassionate conservatism! Though I do appreciate that he admitted to being thoroughly wrong about Mary Seacole after first encountering her name as part of a play at his childrens' school and including her in the book.) The tone is humorous and irreverent throughout, and I was often quite amused. There are some chapters I would have given four stars and some I would have only given two, so I've settled on three as a compromise.Boris' enthusiasm for his subjects (both London and its people) is palpable throughout, and there are a lot of gems tucked in here- as there are in London itself, if you go poking around. Even people who know a thing or two about London may find some surprises. The main problem with the book is that it lacks focus. It seems less like a coherent narrative than what came of Boris wandering- or more often, pedaling- around the City, and sometimes it feels like even the author isn't sure what to make of some of the people he's writing about. (Robert Hooke- misunderstood genius, prickly know-it-all, somewhere in between?) The ending got a bit weak, with a run of uneven chapters. Boris is very- though I suppose not surprisingly- sentimental about the Victorians, and besotted with Keef in a way more schoolgirl than seasoned politician. On the other hand, he's also quite honest about aspects of history other writers might prefer to gloss over, such as the anti-Semitism covered in the Rothschild chapter or the criticisms of Churchill. (He's at some pain to defend the great man, but he at least presents the argument.) I almost feel as though Boris found it much more difficult to approach more recent history, particularly the part of it within his own lifetime. less

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