Customer Reviews

King

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I'm surprised that no one has reviewed this book yet, so here goes. This is a very good biography. It is well-written and judicious, and the narrative moves along briskly, never getting bogged down in details. If you only want to read one biography of King, this should be it.
As Levine makes clear, King was not a very likeable human being. He was extraordinarily vain, prissy, petty, vindictive, and often cruel to subordinates. He also shared many of the prejudices of his time, like anti-Semitism. And there's his obsession with spiritualism and his dead mother, which, although perhaps understandable in a lonely man with few friends or family, is hard to swallow at times. Still, Levine does not reduce King to a caricature, and reminds us that, for all his faults, he was a gifted politician. After all, you don't survive in politics as long as King without an extraordinary degree of talent.
Kudos to Levine for a fine effort.

Levine's biography of King walks a fine line between exposing and understanding the man's faults and eccentricities and displaying the gifts that made him Canada's most successful and greatest prime minister. The reasons for King's successes are hard to fathom, nonetheless. The great strengths of other notable leaders just seem to be absent. But King was deceptive and contradictory that way. He was a gifted man who nonetheless was able to put gifted men in his cabinet and was ready to make the key alliances necessary for sustained success in Quebec. And sometimes, of course, especially with his opposition, he was just lucky. Maybe we just have to call it destiny and leave it at that.

A fine biography that may not unlock King's mystery, but at least lets us look at him from all angles.