Jerome Loving

What a mess.  Recursive and repetitive, not a narrative, no development.  TG it's short.  Some tidbits, at least for me, as I don't believe I've read a Twain bio before.  My only book dart is Heminway's comment on Huck Finn: If you read it you must stop where the nigger Jim is stolen from the boys.  That is the real end.  The rest is just cheating."  Well, I see his point, and almost agree with it, but Tom's juvenile and romantic sense of adventure is a theme Twain had cause to represent to his readers, relevant to the times & larger American culture.  Anyway, that's about all I got out of the book, and I did struggle to find more.  (If you don't believe me, note that the blurbs are by other Twain scholars, writers... not professional reviewers.  Ok, yes, 'critic' can be used as a pejorative, but authors scratching each other's backs is worse....)"… (meer)

This book, on the surface, looks like a much better book than it really is. While it was a good micro biography it was repetitive. If the book had been properly edited, it would have been an article instead of a whole book. He mentions, quotes or rephrases the same story in (what seems like) every chapter in the book. While the story, "The Private History of a Compaign That Failed" is a great addition to all the Civil War, you can only read the same story so many times before becoming bored. While I will loan this book out, I cannot recommend it… (meer)