Rudyard Kipling: A Life

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was not yet 25 when he burst onto the literary scene in London, where his stories of Anglo-Indian life made him an instant celebrity. He won the Nobel Prize in 1907, but by then his critical standing was already in decline, marred in part by popular poems like "The White Man's Burden," which stereotyped him as a tub-thumping jingoist, a reputation he cemented with the distasteful racism of his patriotic appeals during World War I. Poet Harry Ricketts rescues Kipling from cliché in perceptive critical exegeses that remind the reader just how fine a fiction writer he was, pointing out the nuanced appreciation of racial and cultural boundary crossing that informed such masterpieces as Kim. In this brisk narrative, Kipling emerges as a charming, genuinely warm man and a devoted, delightful father; it's no surprise that the children's books Just So Stories and The Jungle Book remain his most beloved works. Without scanting the nastiness of Kipling's reactionary politics, Ricketts suggests their source in personal sorrows that included his 18-year-old son's battlefield death in 1915 and the agonizing demise of his 6-year-old daughter, after which, said Kipling's sister, "he was a sadder and a harder man." --Wendy Smith