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All the King's Men Review
User Submitted All the King's Men ReviewsOctober 29, 2008 Why did I wait? I was assigned this book in an undergrad political science class. I began it and didn't finish it--I suppose because of immaturity. Thirty years later I decided to give it another try. In short, this is one of the best novels I've read, and one of the few books that I want to re-read. June 26, 2008 A Great Book Read By A Great Voice Accidentally picking this up at the library in the audio book section, I gave the first CD a listen and was hooked throughout all 18 CD's in this large, vast and powerful read. All The King's Men was originally pulped in 1946 by Robert Penn Warren, and it is a tale about the corruption of a powerful man I have to get really geeky here and talk about some pop TV for a second. The character Benjamin Linus on ABC's Lost is played by Michael Emerson is one of my favorite TV characters of all time. I was pleased to find out that All The King's Men, the audio book version is read by none other than the Michael Emerson. And since the story is told in first person, Emerson becomes the central charaacter of the story, Jack Burden. There was a movie made recently based on this book, and Burden was played by Jude Law, I believe, and the movie tanked. I'll tell you why it tanked, because Emerson didn't play Jack Burden. His voice and inflection are perfect and it would be hard to imagine no other as the character because Emerson embodies Burden so well, simply by audio. Imagine what he could do on the big screen. That being said, let me tell you how awesome this book was. Coming at it from a point where I knew nothing of the story, it was a great trip into mind of Burden. Burden is a news reporter who, as a young man, gets hooked up with Willie Stark, a politician on the rise who begins his career as a straight shooter, someone even Lincoln would be proud of. But as the story goes on, flashing back and forth from the past to the present, making the book feel timeless and move quickly despite its length, we find Stark turning into the thing we feared he would become most, a politician. Stark's rise and downfall are chronicled by Burden, who tells how his past and present life mix in and blend together with Starks, touching at all points. Burden's thoughts and comments about life and the goings on in the story are often pessimistic and hopeless, and that's perhaps what this book does so well, in that it eventually saves Jack Burden but allows Stark to fall off the deep end, and not a page too late for either. Warren can write southern dialect with the best of them: McCarthy, Faulkner, and the conversations in the book feel real and genuine. Nothing reads so good as some southern fried dialog. This book is deep and touches on many aspects of life: parenthood, death, pride, love, loss of love, philosophy, history, and politics. The characters are singular, and I don't think we'll see another Jack Burden in literature for a long time--someone so callused on the outside but vulnerable as well, with quick wit, a lack of regard for any authority, and one who eventually admits he was wrong about everything. I loved this book, and will read it again in the future. If you are a fan of audio books, you must do this one in your ears. I never experienced a better experience with a narrator than I did with Emerson's Burden. Pick it up, and enjoy. May 21, 2008 great literature, sinfully delicious I read the 1963 edition by Time Inc. This 600 page book is an incredible read, an extremely well written page turner, very visual writing with colorful chanracters that are so real and alive. The book is filled with intriguing events but so skillfully layered and woven with seamless transitions into monologues by the narrator about his reflections on life, history, good and evil, and many more. This is the best book I have read this year so far. May 5, 2008 The Web Of Things I put off reading this novel for almost twenty years from when it was first recommended to me for the simple reason that I dismissed as a "political" novel and, ergo, not of the first water. - How wrong can a prospective reader be?!? - To begin, this is not a "political" novel, per se, and the character of Willie Stark, as compared with the odyssey of Jack Burden, not very gripping. As another reviewer has mentioned, it is only political in the way that Oedipus Rex is political. What All The King's Men is, then, is a beautiful, hauntingly poetic, dark reflection on man's state in the world. It is an authentic American, modernist tragedy. And, like all great works of literature, it resonates in one's mind and heart long after the last page is read and the covers closed. The other reviewers have covered the plots and subplots, so that there doesn't seem much to add save, that, for me, the most engrossing sections were Jack's accounts of his two journeys into the past, one to find "truth", the other to find "the facts" and his deeply poetic rendering of the development of his adolescent love for Anne Stanton, which comes as close to Proustian as anything else in literature. I suppose I would go on to add a caveat here too. As I say, despite the book's somewhat pacific ending, the work is a tragedy, with the accompanying dark Weltanschauung inherent in an authentic tragedy. There are so many passages I could quote to exemplify this perspective to let the reader know what s/he is getting into here, but the best comes at the end of the fourth chapter, after Jack's first dive into the past: "Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping." In other words, beware of trying to trip the light fantastic through this powerful novel. April 16, 2008 Not For The Uncommitted Knowing only that "Robert Penn Warren" was a famous author of some kind, I blindly plucked this book from the shelf of a local library. As I read - - which was sometimes feverish, and sometimes with some amount of irritation - - I did not pursue any reviews or advance information regarding the plot, the characters, or the author's language. That said, I formed my opinion based entirely on my own feelings, as a person living in the 21st century who is exposed to today's barrage of media, television, literature, and current events. For me, the story of Willie Stark is quite secondary to that of Jack Burden. In ways, I barely noticed the "political" aspects to it, or even the supposed evolution of Willie Stark from a man of ideals to a dirty political operative (he was probably the very same person from start to finish). Jack, the storyteller, is a man in his mid-thirties who is generally disillusioned with the world. On rare occasion, he is excited and happy about something, but he - - as the primary character of the book - - is mostly sour, sarcastic, and patronizing. I was never sure whether to wish the best for him. I really wanted to feel positively about someone, and he was the obvious pick, but ultimately I decided that he could fall down an elevator shaft and make a life in the basement of the building, and I would be alright with the direction. Over the course of a month, I picked up the book and put it down several times. If I were taken with the story, of course I would have cleared my calendar and given it the attention I felt it required - - which I share only to suggest that I do get carried away by novels. But this book just wasn't that book at all. Along with this, as I put down and picked up the book, I did encounter a special danger: I would have to retrace my steps a bit to remember where I was if I left it just two days ago, requiring that I thumb backwards 15 pages and re-read. A modern-day novel would let you do this more easily because they tend to thread events, character dialogue, and internal musings together more succinctly and coherently. In 10 pages, the modern-day novel might give the main character four minor challenges and connect that character multiple times in exchanges to other characters, while this 1946 novel in 10 pages will have only shared the musings of the main character about some unanticipated, and sometimes very uninteresting, thoughts about how a barn sticks up out of the mist, and how cows in the field see cars blazing down a highway. Criticism aside, what this book does give a person today is an outlook of the world through the mind of someone (the author) who lived a thoughtful life over 50 years ago. And even the wordiness - - though dizzying, tiring, and frustrating at times - - is a refreshing change for the reader who mostly reads novels written in the past several years, ones that focus less on description and more on keeping a frenetic pace and sequence of activity. I still maintain that in no way is this the "the best book," or even comes close to such a categorization, but Warren's All The King's Men is an interesting read from the standpoint of its own acclaim, history, and position in the literary world. I guess it's what you'd call a "classic." If you have a goal of reading a classic novel, and can afford the time to read well over 600 pages (and sometimes reread some of those pages), All The King's Men is a respectable choice. March 14, 2008 Wonderful Book! To be honest, I originally had a tough time getting into this book. The first 100 pages were a bit confusing because I couldn't tell where the story was headed. However, I kept on reading and I'm glad I did. By the time I neared the end, I had to stay up until 2am to finish the book. The many subplots throughout the story unfolded in such a subtle way that I didn't realize until later that they were all building up to a beautiful, interwoven, complex, story of how people and the passage of time come together to create history and all of its truthful glory. This book is worth the read. December 18, 2007 Possibly the best American Novel Emerson said of Plato's Republic, it is more than a book it is a world. This is also true of Penn Warren's classic political novel. But the political story of the rise and fall of the demagouge Willie Stark is just a veneer for the real story. The real story is the struggle of Jack Burden, the cynical and emotionally reclusive narrator, to understand himself and his role in the chaotic world that surrounds him. This book is a probing reflection into the soul on par with Miller's "Death of a Salesman." The movie starring Jude Law and Sean Penn did not do it any kind of justice. A must read. November 24, 2007 Overwrought and overwritten This is an enjoyably turgid potboiler with large pretensions. The narrator's prose mixes tough-guy cynicism with over-the-top poeticizing. The author's literary ability is always in the foreground. Several stories, each entertainingly pulpy, are interwoven, except a historical romance that remains unrelated to the main plot. While basically chronological, the organization often makes better thematic than narrative sense. The weakness of the book is that almost all of it comes off as artifice and contrivance. Only Willie Stark and Jack Burden intermittently ring true. The other characters, especially the women, are props stuffed with clichés. The plots churn with coincidences and melodramatic events. And some passages are close to camp in their laughably extravagant rhetoric. October 5, 2007 Carefully Balanced Melodrama with Fabulous Poetic Writing ALL THE KING'S MEN has a rich mix of carefully balanced characters who help Jack Burden, the narrator, explore the paths he, his childhood friends, his colleagues, and his parents take through life. At this level, ATKM is a carefully wrought story, more about the tyranny of the past than the bare knuckled compromises of politics, with the character Sadie Burke contrasting with Anne Stanton, Willie Stark contrasting with Adam Stanton and Tiny Duffy, Jack Burden contrasting with Sugar Boy, and so on. But while all of these characters are fully realized, they are also somewhat predictable. It is for this reason that ATKM seems like a melodrama; once you get the characters, their stories fail to surprise. Nonetheless, this novel is well worth reading, primarily because of Robert Penn Warren's fabulous style. I'm no expert. But most authors I read seem to use metaphors and similes to create a quick burst of insight or beauty. Yes, Updike, Chabon, McEwan and maybe a few others create occasional passages of descriptive writing with multiple elements that fit together in amazing extended metaphors. But Warren does this repeatedly, taking an idea and exploring it for 100 words or more. This, in my opinion, explains why ATKM has lasted: much of the novel is very fine poetic prose. Here's one example: "In the morning it had stopped raining and there was the sun. I went out and saw the thin pools of water standing on the black ground, like sheets of isinglass. Around the japonicas, the white and red and coral petals, which had been shattered from the blossoms, floated on the blackly gleaming pools. Some of them floated with the curled edges upward, like boats, and around them other petals floated upside down or had shipped water, making a gay carnage as though a battleship had fired a couple of salvos into a fleet of carnival barges and gondolas in some giddy, happy, far-off land." Warren's poetic style helps explain why ATKM is both a long book but a fast read. September 29, 2007 This is MY review Overall, I thought the story was okay. I am not much of a fan of Penn's prose, and this book dragged until Jack Burden retells the story of Cass Mastern. For me, this is where the book starts falling into place. Maybe I was set up for failure with this book because I keep seeing this novel being called "political fiction." As someone picking this up expecting "political fiction," you'd expect the story to focus on Willie Stark and in much more detail of his humble beginnings to his tragic downfall, but he is only a distant focal point in this novel as the story belongs to one of Stark's cronies, Jack Burden. I don't know WHY I'm supposed to give a flip about Jack Burden and after finishing the novel, I still don't give a toss for the character. There are so many sub-plots and interesting characters within the story that I was much more interested in than the big picture of Burden's personal "odyssey." I felt that some of the story was predictable (Burden's father) and some of the book just didn't seem feasible (the relationship between Stark and Anne Stanton). So all in all, this book didn't do it for me. I have read better. For more All the King's Men reviews click here.
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