Customer Reviews (23)

A Portentous Masterpiece
Brave New World may be the most important novel of the 20th century.Huxley's work envisions a future society trivializing itself to death.What is sad is that we are well on our way to this brave new world and that most of your reviewers just don't get it. Soma is everywhere----television, Hollywood, politics as entertainment, etc. Read this book and try to understand what Huxley was saying.Brave New World is all around you.

Brave New World: A Perception of the Future
Creating a depiction of what the future can hold is a task that Aldous Huxley tackled in his 1932 published book, Brave New World.It tells the story of two main characters, Bernard Marx and John ?the Savage.?The rebellious Marx is filled with an inner hatred towards the Utopian society.John is an outsider with many dissimilar views on Utopia.Both live in a controlled world that divides humans into a caste system.The story begins 632 years after the brave new world (Utopia) has existed.Babies are born in test tubes, a person?s future is determined before birth, the state police control the people?s freedom, Soma is a substance that prevents the people from opening their mind, and the new world is ruled by dictators called World Controllers.Huxley enlightens the reader with a curiosity for the new world but does not give Marx or John the influence to change Utopia into democracy (or sanity).Marx is merely a thinker; he does not show any action towards his belief on society.I believe the intensity of the climax would be greater if Marx took initiative with John to spread the word of freedom and democracy.Although John tries to teach society of open-mindedness, he fails and ends up being in the hands of the people.The novel would serve a better purpose in change than in persistence.
With the climax not being fulfilled to my expectations, Huxley does create a forecast when writing about the topic of overpopulation.This is only one example in the novel where Huxley is picked out as a predictor and makes me speculate where our society could be headed.In the 1930?s economists were afraid that the population of life on earth was outgrowing the availability of natural resources (Paul, Warren. Brave New World-Cliff Notes).Huxley foretold this bold statement.In his novel, the depiction of the state police keeping track of how many infants were born and the plan of social role before birth, was comparable to the problem raised in the 1930?s.Issues like overpopulation and human restrictions add great curiosity to the story, making Huxley brilliant at his work.He leaves you wondering what this world may come to if our freedom is ruled by a higher dictatorship.I recommend this novel to anyone seeking a possible outlook on the future of our society.

Everyone is happy now
Huxley's classic Brave New World is a study in happiness.He starts with the concept of making everyone happy and then shows us that there is always unhappiness in humanity no matter what we try to do to abolish it.In eliminating all of the things that cause us pain, this society also eliminates all that could cause joy.Stripped of all emotion, they are left with a sensual world.This novel is not a prediction.It is a study of human nature."To err is human."Therefore, we must accept our nightmares if we want to have dreams.There is no such thing as a human utopia.

Please don't be stupid.
I read a review someone gave of this book that said Brave New World is "boring" and "absurdly weak."The review stated that "the general portrait of the future is very brief and full of lacunes, [and] one of the characters spent the entire book just quoting Shakespeare."I disagree strongly with this view.I did not find this book to be at all boring; in fact, I thought it was extremely well composed and amazingly detailed in its view of a dystopian future.The above mentioned reviewer's statement that The Savage quotes Shakespeare too much is absurd.Huxley cleverly uses Shakespeare's writing to show the distinct difference between our society today (or how it was in the 1930's, rather) and this anti-utopia that he has created.Shakespeare is known as the greatest writer of all time in the English language for a reason: he wrote about the nature and lives of people in such a way that we can all relate to it.Shakespeare so gracefully characterized human nature; the point that Huxley is trying to make with Shakespeare is that this "Brave New World" has been so dehumanized that they can no longer even relate to basic universal truths such as love, jealousy and unhappiness.It is an extremely powerful way of making his point about his dystopian society.While Huxley's character development is not his strong point, the picture that he paints of a future society is frightening.Ignore the reviewer I referred to.Read this book.

brave new world: not helpful
i did not find the BNW review to be helpful in my study of the novel.It was lackluster in details and proved to be no assistance. I do not recommend wasting precious dollars on such inflamatory work. ... Read more

Book Description
These first two volumes of a projected six collect the complete essays of one of the major writers of the 20th century. His reading was immense, his taste impeccable, and his ear acute....His place in English literature is unique and is certainly assured. --T. S. Eliot. Edited with Commentary by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. ... Read more

Book Description
Newly published essays and letters, edited and introduced by David Bradshaw, showing Huxley's transformation from a scourge of the masses in the 1920s to their compassionate spokesman by the 1930s, and including writings on art and literature, and letters to H. L. Mencken and H. G. Wells. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Pivotal to understanding Huxley!
Certainly, Aldous Huxley believed in the rule of elites and had anti-democratic notions -- for a period of time. In these essays and letters it is a troubled Huxley that can't fathom the solutions to thesocial problems of his time that can be observed. He went through manychanges and was greatly influenced in thought by ocurrances which he had tolive through. This is a pivotal point to understading Huxley which has beenoverlooked as a consequence of the "claims" that his greatestnovels are a few that only reflect one period of his life (e.g. Brave NewWorld). Must read! Redeems Huxley as a thinker with great love and concernfor masses. ... Read more

Book Description
In this fourth volume of a projected six, Huxley registers his deep misgivings about the course of history in the late 1930s as the world moved toward a second global war.Many of his essays reflect his continuing interest in the conventions of popular culture as well as the philosophy of science and history, particularly as they inform developments in art and politics. ... Read more

Product Description
Sebastian Barnack, a handsome English schoolboy, goes to Italy for the summer, and there his real education begins. His teachers are two quite different men: Bruno Rontini, the saintly bookseller, who teaches him about things spiritual; and Uncle Eustace, who introduces him to life's profane pleasures.

The novel that Aldous Huxley himself thought was his most successful at "fusing idea with story," Time Must Have a Stop is part of Huxley's lifelong attempt to explore the dilemmas of twentieth-century man and to create characters who, though ill-equipped to solve the dilemmas, all go stumbling on in their painfully serious comedies (in this novel we have the dead atheist who returns in a seance to reveal what he has learned after death but is stuck with a second-rate medium who garbles his messages). Time Must Have a Stop is one of Huxley's finest achievements. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Aldous Huxley - The Great Explainer
At the centre of this book is a marvellous attempt to describe what happens to the 'soul' after a human dies. Huxleys ideas for the novel are based on the Bardo Thodol (better known in the West as The Tibetan Book of The Dead). While you follow the dead person through various bardo states Huxley stays very much rooted in what we perceive as the everyday world, his characters dialogues entertaining us with customary Huxley wisdom and wit on everything from politics to art and literature. Another wonderful voyage with one of the pioneer synthesizers of East and West.

Best Huxley novel I've read so far
This book is not for everyone. If you like and understand satirical views of Victorian society and you have a knowledge or interest in art, poetry, and theology then you'll find this book intellectually stimulating. If you don't appreciate any of these things you might find it presumptuous and at the very least boring. So I admit this book is very much intoned to a specific audience.

The book delves into discussions of just about everything under the sun. It goes through saintliness, theology, art, poetry, schooling, etiquette, and morals. The characters add further insight with their behaviors. I was particularly fond of Mrs. Thwale who perfectly embodies the female mystique and femme fatale. A lascivious woman of Victorian sensibilities and honor she flits from one man to the next, never giving herself up. The main character, probably the least well-rounded, seems to be a flawless embodiment of the stereotypical teenager who thinks he's the center of the universe.

Certain points are just terribly cruel but absolutely hilarious in that twisted satirical way. At one point the elderly Queen Mother clutches her dead dog in mourning but almost as soon as a new puppy is handed over to her she lets the dog fall off her lap and flop to the ground. I believe there is a point to be made here.

Though I admit I don't even remotely agree with the discussions of sainthood I did find it an interesting read. It proved Huxley is evermore a very complicated and perhaps conflicted character in and of himself. Though I give this book five stars I still think it bears repeating it's not for everyone.

A rather trite and overused metaphysical parable
Masked by large quantities of frighteningly erudite British/cultural social satire. As an eager young American, I found myself entranced, and initially a little intimidated, by Huxley's god's eye view ofOxford-educated, limerick-composing, medieval-theologian-reference-making,pre-WWII upper-middle class Europeans. Imagine my incredulity atdiscovering at something like one fourth of the way through that the authorwas attempting to make some sort of seriousand self-important point aboutthe fate of humanity. Then, imagine my further incredulity at discoveringabout halfway through that this was one of those horrible 'instructive'works of literature where all literary merits are subordinated to a morallesson. Finally, imagine my relief mingled with new-found disrespect forAldous Huxley when I saw at the book's end that the aforementioned morallesson involved nothing more than a cheap, pretentious, unimaginativeleap-of-faith argument that has probably been around since the time ofPlato himself. Oi. Now at last I can say with confidence: Huxley? Please.That is *so* passe...

Intermittently brilliant
Huxley was a man of many bizarre ideas as well as an uneven writer, but he could also be quite a deep and compelling thinker.This book is a particularly vivid example of this contradiction.I found parts of thenovel almost painfully bad (one of the characters trying to communicatefrom the afterlife through an incompetent medium, or the epilogue that ineffect abandons any pretense of being part of novel in order to become anunconfortable mix of essay and sermon).There is also the lingeringproblem of Huxley's uninformed and unfair attitude towards natural science. But in exchange for accepting these failures the reader gets twoextraordinary character portraits: one of a monster (Mrs. Thwale) and oneof a saint (Bruno the bookseller), both very convincing and immenselyinsightful.Add to that a penetrating study of the perils ofself-absorption, a sound case for moral restraint, and the best diagnosis Ihave come across of why artists who express the most sublime insight abouthuman nature can still behave like swine.It's sad and doubly ironic theHuxley himself should have been an impeachable character.Anyway, quite aworthwhile read.

Huxley is a genious.
Huxley is the master of complex philosophical writing.This is not "Brave New World" at all.It is much more complex, and it's theme is different. ... Read more

Book Description
This third volume (including the years 1930D1935) of a projected six reinforces Huxley's stature as one of the most acute and informed observers of the social and ideological trends of the years between the world wars. These essays register his growing ambivalence about the role of technocracy and science in an era of experimentation in the concentration of executive and legislative power. He was among the few writers who...played with ideas so freely, so gaily, with such virtuosity, that the responsive reader...was dazzled and excited. --Isaiah Berlin. Commendable. --Times Literary Supplement. A remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited. --Jeffrey Hart, Washington Times. Edited with Commentary by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Rich, seasoned commentary on history and modern times
This third volume of Huxley's complete essays will appeal to a college collection which already has the first two volumes and anticipates collecting the entire six: this volume covers 1930-35 and collects his observations of the social and political trends of those years. Important essays and articles provide rich, seasoned commentary on history and modern times. ... Read more

Book Description
These first two volumes of a projected six collect the complete essays of one of the major writers of the 20th century. His reading was immense, his taste impeccable, and his ear acute....His place in English literature is unique and is certainly assured. --T. S. Eliot. Edited with Commentary by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. ... Read more

Book Description
A full-scale biography by the brilliant English novelist, an intimate friend of the Huxleys through four decades. She re-creates not only the private Huxley and the literary Huxley but the entire intellectual and social era to which he was central. One of the great classic English biographies...as forbidding to competitors as Boswell's life of Johnson. --Philip Hensher, Spectator ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

sympathy and objectivity make a fine book
I read this superb biography years ago, as part of a Summer's "free reading" (a luxury for an academic), for I had no particular interest in Huxley, having read only his "Chrome Yellow" and "Point Counter Point" at that time.Bedford, I discovered, is a glorious writer (she has written probably the best book in English on Mexico) and possesses rare insight into the minds of other artists.These gifts make her biography of Huxley a masterpiece.As you follow her narrative, you will be impelled, I predict, to read the Huxley novels you have thus far ignored.

Deftly probes Huxley's life and writings
Syville Bedford's literary biography Aldous Huxley blends Huxley's remarkable life with his quite successful literary career, all wrapped in the familiarity of the author with Huxley's family over the decades. With such associations in hand, biographer and author Syville Bedford then deftly probes Huxley's life and writings, creating a memorable biography and a set of insights that deserves ongoing mention. ... Read more

Book Description
At their best, Huxley's essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature. From 1938 to 1956 Aldous Huxley continues to explore the role of science and technology in modern culture, and seeks a final level of foundational Truth that might provide the basis for his growing interest in religious mysticism. It is in this period that his philosophy of history took its final form. Here is the fifth volume of a projected six. He writes with an easy assurance and a command of classical and modern cross-references. --Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times. There is much to enjoy in these volumes...they are important as a document of his times, and of a window on to a stage in the evolution of his mind. --Economist. Aldous Huxley very early in life became one of the leading essayists of the 20th century. --Michael Potemra, National Review ... Read more

Book Description
In this accessible new biography, Dana Sawyer explores Huxley's life and the impact it had on his writings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent Read
I enjoyed the book. When I read it, I felt that the author was a close friend of Huxley's.If any reader plans on reading any books by Huxley, please read this informative, well-written biography first.

~
Laura Huxley herself said to Sawyer [paraphrased], "Out of all the biographies written about Aldous, this is the only one he would have actually liked." With emphasis on philosophical studies and works, it is the definitive source for understanding Huxley's influence and ideas. Being a student myself at Maine College of Art, I can vouch for the know-how of Sawyer. ... Read more

Book Description
Of the ten thousand letters that Aldous Huxley wrote, only a fraction have been published. Almost forty years after the first appearance of a volume of Huxley's letters, those that were once considered too sensitive for publication can now be included in ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A powerful gathering of his personal and intellectual life
Any college-level collection strong in Huxley literature needs SELECTED LETTERS: it's a powerful gathering of his personal and intellectual life in letters - most of them published for the first time - and is especially notable in light of the fact that of some ten thousand letters he wrote, only a fraction have previously been published - and that this volume comes nearly forty years after the first appearance of another volume of letters. These here have never been published, providing a fine new collection for any college-level library already strong in Huxley works, who would round out their offerings with nonfiction.
... Read more

Book Description
For the first time in twenty-five years, Nicholas Murray provides new insights into the life of this colorful writer. A fashionable figure of the 1920s, Aldous Huxley produced several witty and daring novels. However, it is his celebrated portrayal of a nightmare future society in Brave New World for which Huxley is re-mem-bered today. A truly visionary book, it was a watershed in Huxley's worldview-coinciding with his move to Cali-for-nia and experimentation with mysticism and psyche-delic drugs in later life. Aldous Huxley possesses the greatest virtue of literary bio-gra-phies: It will make readers want to read its subject's work all over again.Download Description
The first biography in decades of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, Doors of Perception and other classics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

exceptionally grand
a remarkably thorough and eloquent work that captures all the essentials and much, much more. Every chapter proves to be a highly entertaining trip through the mind and life of the subject.

This marvelous work is easily one of the best biographies I have ever read and far more satisfying in most ways than many others.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

More Than Just a One-Book Author
Most people today know Aldous Huxley, assuming they know him at all, as the author of "Brave New World," which was no doubt inflicted on them in a High School English class.

But Huxley was more than just a one-book author.Having been spared the carnage of the Great War due to his defective eyesight (which probably saved his life -- remember that 60,000 young Englishmen were killed in the Battle of the Somme in one day), he epitomized the weary, cynical post-war mood of the post-War 1920s in novels such as "Crome Yellow" and "Antic Hay" (the latter of which, all 100,000 words, was written in two months).These books were admired by fellow authors (among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, who would portray Huxley, who by that time had moved to Hollywood, as the author "Boxley" in his last, unfinished novel "The Last Tycoon").

But Huxley turned towards mysticism and theology as he aged, helped, no doubt, by his move to California in the late 1930s.Instead of having friends like D.H. Lawrence (whose letters he edited), he instead began hanging out with Hollywood celebrities like Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx -- the latter of whom he once regaled with the idea of the Marx Brothers making a film about Marxism with Groucho playing Karl (Harpo didn't realize that Huxley was teasing, telling him that such an idea would never fly in Hollywood).His biggest credit as a screenwriter was the M-G-M adaptation of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" with Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy.

His later books, such as "Ends and Means" (much admired by the American monk Thomas Merton) and "The Doors of Peception" (which would inspire the name of the famous rock band fronted by Jim Morrison) would chart his spiritual quest, which would eventually involve Huxley's experimentation with such drugs as Mescalin and LSD.

It's a fascinating life, and the author tells it well, feeling free to be considerably more frank about the Huxleys and their marriage then was Huxleys previous biographer, Sybille Bedford (perhaps because Bedford had aparently bedded both of the Huxleys).The author is hampered to some extent due to the fact that a considerable amount of Huxley's papers were destroyed in a fire in the early 1960s, but he manages to tell the story of Huxley's long and interesting life in such a way that makes you want to hit the library and find some of his books.

You know, for a literary biography, you can't ask for much more than that.

Highly recommended!
Nicholas Murray's new work is the first full-length biography of Aldous Huxley--author of Point Counter Point (1928), a satiric examination of early 20th-century society, and Brave New World (1932), a sharp indictment of modern technology--since the authorized biography by Sybille Bedford, published in two volumes (1973, 1974).

Seeking to justify a new biography of Huxley, Murray points out that the last thirty years have seen the publication of many collected editions of letters and diaries of those who knew him--D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and many others.

Murray also notes that, in addition to these published works, there is now a wealth of unpublished material, which necessitates a bringing up to date of the Huxley story.

"The intimate life of Aldous Huxley and his remarkable wife, Maria, can now be more fully documented," writes urray. "Maria's bisexuality, the extraordinary menage a trois in the 1920s of Aldous, Maria, and Mary Hutchinson ["this extraordinary triangulation"]--absent for obvious reasons from previous biographical accounts--are described here for the first time."

With the key dramatis personae in Huxley's life now deceased, the fully story of one of the most distinguished writers of the 20th century can now be told.

A member of a distinguished scientific and literary family, the British novelist, essayist, poet, and critic Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) was the grandson of the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), a scientist who gained fame as "Darwin's bulldog" (the staunchest supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and notoriety as a tenacious debater against antievolutionists, including scientists as well as clergy).

Aldous Huxley was also the great-nephew of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), a literary artist who, incidentally, was the author of this reviewer's favorite poem, "Dover Beach."

Huxley was prevented from studying medicine because of an eye ailment that partially blinded him at the age of 16, causing a lifelong struggle with defective eyesight. Nevertheless, he became a voracious, omnivorous reader, holding his eyes close to the books he read and using a thick magnifying glass. His wife Maria also often read to him.

While still a student at Balliol (Oxford University), Huxley published two volumes of poetry. T. S.Eliot, one of Huxley's friends, observed that Huxley was "better equipped with the vocabulary of a poet than with the inspiration of a oet." "Eliot was almost certainly right," says Murray, "in his view that [Huxley's] talent was for prose."

Murray writes of Huxley's early days at Balliol: "Another inconvenience was having rooms opposite the Chapel, as he confided to his young friend, Jelly D'Aranyi, the concert violinist: 'one is made unhappy on Sundays by the noise of people singing hymns.' Clearly, neither Chapel nor the 'awful noise' of the hymn-singers which 'rather gets on my nerves' would appeal to the grandson of the man who invented the word 'agnostic.' "

Huxley often commented that his forte was not in writing poetry, novels, or plays (to which he devoted much time and energy during his years in Hollywood), but to the writing of essays--the didactic exposition of aesthetic, social, political, and religious ideas.

Indeed, Huxley became of the great essayists of the 20th century (a fact underscored by the completion of an ambitious project by Ivan R. Dee Publishers: a six-volume edition titled Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, completed last year).

Huxley's most celebrated work, Brave New World, is a bitterly sarcastic account of an inhumane dystopia controlled by technology, in which art and religion have been abolished and human beings reproduce by artificial fertilization. The inhabitants of such a "perfect world" suffer from terminal boredom and ennui.

The title of Huxley's famous novel is taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest (Act V, Scene 1, lines 184-186), in which Miranda says, "O, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world, / That has such people in 't"

Increasingly convinced that "modern man" suffered from spiritual bankruptcy, Huxley recommended two time-tested antidotes to nihilism: psychedelic drugs (he experimented with mescaline and LSD) and mysticism.

For example, in his novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) he portrays the central character's conversion from selfish isolation to transcendental mysticism, and in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) he describes the use of mescaline to induce visionary states of mind and an expanded consciousness.

"I am not a religious man," wrote Huxley, "in the sense that I am not a believer in metaphysical propositions, not a worshipper or performer of rituals, and not a joiner of churches." And yet, regretting that the modern world lacked potent symbols, "cosmic symbols"--only nationalist flags and swastikas--he said, "One can be agnostic and a mystic at the same time."

In his later years Huxley turned toward an "undogmatic" mysticism found, he believed, in the "wisdom of the East": Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. He was convinced that the truths of mysticism were profounder than those of science. But he also said, "Man cannot live by contemplative receptivity and artistic creation alone . . . he needs science and technology."

Science and spirituality: these were the twin foci of Huxley's oeuvre. Indeed, his entire life may be viewed as an attempt to synthesize, by literary means, the scientific and the spiritual--to arrive, as it were, at a rapprochement between the "two cultures."

Murray's biography reads like a Who's Who of the rich and famous. In its pages we meet, along with many others, Lady Ottoline Morrell, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, H. L. Mencken, Anita Loos, Christopher Isherwood, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, and the astronomer Edwin Hubble.

Intelligent and sympathetic, rich and rewarding, Aldous Huxley: A Biography is an engrossing read. Highly recommended!

An Important Biography
There is no question that Aldous Huxley is one of the most important and influential minds of the twentieth century - a prophet, novelist, poet, dramatist and essayist that expressed some of the most interesting and disturbing commentary about the condition of human beings and their relationship to society. Huxley's concerns are our concerns - overpopulation, ecology, eugenics, fair and oppressive government, drug use and the nature of religion and art. He wrote extensively on all these subjects with eerie insight and awareness. Poet and author, Nicholas Murray, provides a window into Huxley's life and character, which shows us an intellectual continually striving for knowledge: intuitive, scientific and otherwise.

As a personality, Murry points out that Huxley was an abstractionist trying to come to terms with his instinctual nature. But Huxley was probably harder on himself than any critic could be. He described himself as a 'cerebrotonic', and defines the type:

"The cerebrotonic is the over-alert, over-sensitive introvert, who is more concerned with the inner universe of his own thoughts and feelings and imagination than the external world...Their normal manner is inhibited and restrained and when it comes to the expression of feelings they are outwardly so inhibited that viscerotonics suspect them of being heartless." (P.3)

Huxley was anything but 'heartless'. If one reads his novels, early poetry and essays, can see that he was a humanist, presenting us with the follies of the human condition with the intention of making the world a better place.

Murry paints us a portrait of a man who wrote because, '...the wolf was at the door.' He was a seeker of knowledge who wanted to join the artistic sensibility with that of the scientific. In fact, one of his last essays, 'Literature and Science' was an attempt at such a synthesis: 'Man cannot live by contemplative receptivity and artistic creation alone...he needs science and technology.' (P.451)

What emerges from this text is an individual with a ravenous thirst for knowledge, an artist/scientist who wanted to pave new paths towards a more understanding world. This is an excellent biography, brilliantly written, of a complex and fascinating being. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Distilling the biographer's art!
A perfect biography of one of the most celebrated and most interesting figures of the 20th century. The panoramic range of Huxley's genius is magnificently brought to life in this book. Everything is here- his historic antecedents, his famous family, his 30 yr. marriage to the beautiful Maria, the creation of his books, and not a little as well about his "psychedelic" period and his book "The Doors of Perception." Of course, Huxley is a marvelously inviting subject, intelligence and temperament combined in a man possessed ofextraordinary natural gifts.The keen intellect of novelist Bedford is the key element; a rich understanding of Huxley's singular dialectic and his notably uncanny inner aesthetics makes splendid reading.The whole book is warm and true; the affection of the writer toward her subject is clear, but never interfering, never common or cloying.Bedford generously lets the reader walk and talk, travel and sup with Huxley, and her narrative skills are perfectly honed for such a daring operation; after all, it's one thing to merely write a biography of note, and another to unsheathe someone down to pure gold.The latter would seem to be Bedford's forte in these pages; it is a miracle of literary biography and an extraordinary experience.Highest recommendation without reservation.

Prophet demystified
SB does a truly remarkable job of portraying Huxley as he really was; from the vantage point of a next-door neighbour who soon moved in with the Huxleys, SB slowly reveals the everyday life of a man who was regarded as aprophet in his lifetime and has now come to be acknowledged as one of themost erudite men of the last century while at the same time being ahumanist to the core. The book could have crossed over to being an eulogybut manages to maintain its balance and objectivity through its length andprovides us with a scholarly perspective on the man as now other book does.She has integrated the personal life and impressions of many of the peoplewho figured in Aldous's life with the works of the man and analyzes how thevarious experiences of his life influenced his books. It continues toremain the definitive book on Aldous Huxley three decades after its firstpublication. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

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