The Long Trail: Kipling Round the World
- ISBN-10
- 0953632407
- ISBN-13
- 9780953632404
- Series
- The Long Trail
- Category
- Biography & Autobiography / General
- Pages
- 261
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1999
- Publisher
- Tideway House
- Author
- Meryl Macdonald
Description
So what made Kipling 'tick'? His Celtic roots, his early Indian childhood -- or a clash between both cultures? This unusual non-literary biography discloses the man behind the name and its 'received' image; reveals why he wrote so compellingly about the sea and ships; had a love affair with steam and motive power, becoming a pioneer motorist at the turn of the century. From the passenger seat -- he never drove himself -- he discovered England, 'the most wonderful of all foreign countries'. But it was on a hired bicycle he discovered 'the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River...' Unlike the average globe-trotter he was often a prey to melancholy, of longing for his previous home across the sea: for North Devon when he was in India, for India when he was in London living near the Thames, and for America when he was back in England after four of the happiest years of his life in Vermont. The Welsh have a word for it: hiraeth. It is an overwhelming yearning tinged with melancholy that is entirely Celtic, and not always understood by the more phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon. It often overcame Kipling when he was within sight or sound of water, and it acted on his imagination like a spark in a combustion chamber. A 'subversive pamphleteer' turned Special Correspondent in India, Rudyard Kipling put the 'Tommy' on the map for all time -- before taking up with the Senior Service and 'playing at being a sailor', on manoeuvres with the Channel Squadron and speed trials of a new destroyer. A childhood ambition to join the navy had been thwarted by his myopia. Indisputably, his prophetic eye saw what others could not -- would not, perhaps. He prophesied the advent of two world wars years before they broke out. In World War One he was an official war reporter. In France and Italy, and in the North Sea, Kipling learned enough of the horrors of war to know the odds against his son's return when John was reported 'missing' at Loos.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake
By Henry TimberlakeThe Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake
-
Interviews with William Carlos Williams: "speaking Straight Ahead"
By William Carlos WilliamsDr. Williams discusses his own work and that of such contemporaries as Pound and Eliot and reveals his thoughts on a wide variety of twentieth-century concerns
-
雪球：巴菲特傳（最新增訂版）
By 艾莉絲．施洛德巴菲特畢生唯一授權傳記 全球首富與世人分享最慷慨的資產 除了股票，巴菲特更教你投資自己 ｜最新增訂版｜新增第63章危機、第64章雪球 ...
-
遇見安徒生
By 安徒生（H.C.Andersen）、葉君健本書內容分三部分:一為葉君健所寫評論安徒生其人其文的文章;二為安徒生所寫小故事;三為安徒生繪圖作品
-
Alta California, 1840-1842: The Journal and Observations of William Dane Phelps, Master of the Ship "Alert"
By William Dane Phelps276-9 , 403-3 ) ; William Richard Cutter , Genealogical and Personal Memoirs relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts ( N.Y. , 1908 ) , II , pp . 867-69 ; William Bentley , The Diary of William Bentley ...
-
Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of a Citizen of New-york, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853,...
By Solomon NorthupTwelve Years a Slave: Narrative of a Citizen of New-york, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853,...
-
Behind the Scenes. by Elizabeth Keckley. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.
By Elizabeth KeckleyBehind the Scenes. by Elizabeth Keckley. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.
-
Personal Memoir of Daniel Drayton: For Four Years and Four Months a Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) in Washington Jail
By Daniel DraytonPersonal Memoir of Daniel Drayton: For Four Years and Four Months a Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) in Washington Jail
-
Journalists of the United States: Biographical Sketches of Print and Broadcast News Shapers from the Late 17th Century to the...
By Robert Bingham Downs, Jane B. DownsWhen the Press folded after eighteen months , Cooper went to the Indianapolis Sun , as a police reporter . In 1901 he became Scripps - McRae's Indianapolis correspondent and then manager of the Indianapolis bureau , supplying news to a ...
-
Give Us Each Day: The Diary
By Alice Moore Dunbar-NelsonGive Us Each Day: The Diary