Winston Churchill : a biography /

Brendon (Eminent Edwardians, The Life and Death of the Press Barons) has achieved, as he wished, ""a brief life"" of a long, full, momentous life--or, more precisely, a successful likeness of Churchill the Extravagant Character. The early pages, in particular, tend to be more color than substance; some readers may find the high pitch monotonic, the subject becoming unsympathetic, even a pain. One quoted, facile judgment--""Churchill's vices were simply his virtues in exaggerated form""--can then serve to sum up all the bumptiousness and dynamism, the obstinacy and doggedness, the crackpot and visionary schemes. Or it can all be said, as Brendon does too, in the single word ""ambition."" A certain want of feeling and insight leads him to write, after some inconclusive, childhood-trauma speculations: ""What can be said with assurance. . . is that Churchill was anything but crushed by the callous and perfunctory treatment he received at the hands of his parents."" But Brendon's superficial balance of positives and negatives, and his substitution of vividness for warmth, do not prevail unvaryingly throughout. Thus, he tallies-up Churchill's navy-strengthening accomplishments as embattled, pre-WW I First Lord of the Admiralty; he joins the critics of the much-argued Dardanelles campaign; and he is exacting, later, on Churchill's second, post-WW II ministry--the ""dithering old man"" sporadically asserting authority. (Still later, he will movingly show the senile Churchill sporadically roused, and sparkling.) In a firm, keen judgment, he notes that Churchill's military advisers served him best, in both wars, by adopting his own tactics, and repulsing him ""in no uncertain terms."" His great WW II contribution, felicitously phrased, was to create ""a new Britain in his own heroic image."" Finally, Churchill was a wordsmith--and Brendon is good on Churchill's journalism, his historical writing, his oratory: the whole language-and-politics connection. Fond, tempering Clementine's contribution is there too, along with the cosseting of, and disappointments with, the children. Also the odd friendships, especially (again) with men-of-words. So the book not only fills a gap; it does intermittently and increasingly give Churchill-the-phenomenon some stature and some humanity. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.