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Tom Stoppard: A Life
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62/99
Critics' Rating Index
78/99
Readers' Rating Index
84/99
Scholars' Citation Index
99/99
Volume of Reviews
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About This Book
Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love--remain as fresh and moving today as when they dazzled their first audiences. Stoppard's life, too, is fascinating: born in Czechoslovakia, he escaped the Nazis with his mother and spent his early years in Singapore and India before arriving in England at age eight. Skipping university, he embarked on a brilliant career, becoming close friends over the years with an astonishing array of writers, actors, directors, musicians, and political figures, from Peter O'Toole, Harold Pinter, and Stephen Spielberg to Mick Jagger and Vaclav Havel. Having long described himself as a "bounced Czech," Stoppard was surprised to learn late in life of his Jewish family and the relatives he lost to the Holocaust, secrets his mother had kept from him. Hermione Lee's in-depth analysis seamlessly weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful, and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man.
Reviews
"In addition to the almost unrelievedly positive portrayal of Stoppard, the seven-hundred-fifty-plus pages of this volume might have been somewhat condensed, were its subject no longer living, thereby rendering the biography easier to wield and to read."
"Except for some over detailing of some of Stoppard's important plays, Lee turns in a masterful performance of the biographer's craft ..."
"a biographical masterpiece ..."
"excellent and exhaustive, but sometimes too spellbound ..."
"Instead, Tom Stoppard remains alive to the unlikeliness of Tom Stoppard's career from the very beginning ..."
"Room is left for doubt—again in Stoppardian fashion ..."
"She greets us, rather forebodingly, with a genealogical tree, as if the extended Stoppard family were a medieval royal house."
"Lee...is the perfect choice to write about Stoppard's riveting life ..."
"His biographer clearly shows he is fundamentally happiest when he is on his own, working through the night on his latest play ..."
"Lee's account is a deeply detailed and valuable contribution to literary history."
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