Review by Choice Review
Like Kenneth Johnston's The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (CH, Oct'98), West's work on Defoe is packaged to attract readers by promising to make the writer's life a compelling series of adventures. With the exception of the theory that Defoe went to school at Dorking in Surrey, West does not introduce any new evidence or theories; he relies heavily on Paula Backscheider's Daniel Defoe: His Life (CH, Feb'90), which is impeccably scholarly but also clearly and accessibly written. For whom, then, is this synthetic book intended? Can readers not cope with a proper scholarly biography, with footnotes and acknowledgment of extensive archival sources? West (Claremont McKenna College) strives for chumminess with his subject and defends Defoe's "Puritan faith" above all else. Much of the book consists of plot summaries of Defoe's works. West's political agenda is openly that of rescuing Defoe from the supposed neglect of his reputation brought about by "Marxism, Freudianism, feminism and sociology." No one first encountering Defoe through this book would ever suspect that he has been regarded as crucial to the 18th-century canon for decades, particularly thanks to the efforts of scholars inspired by Marxism, feminism, and the sociology of literature. West is fighting a rearguard action in the dark. Not for academic collections. D. Landry; Wayne State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Few biographical subjects have led more intriguing lives than Defoe (1660^-1731). He is most famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe, but that ur-novel was a product of the penultimate of several careers. Defoe had been a rebel soldier, a feckless entrepreneur, a fearless pamphleteer, a confidant to King William III, a Tory government spy, and a pioneering political journalist before becoming a book writer who mixed fiction and fact so smoothly that literary detectives are still sifting the realities out of his so-called novels and the fancies out of his classic Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain. Bankrupted young, he later sat in the pillory for the sake of a free press and proved so politically independent that he was finally attacked by Tories and Whigs alike. Meanwhile, he sired seven children in his marriage to the long-suffering Mary Tuffley. During his last years, though a semi-invalid after a horrible operation for bladder stones, he ventured into business again, with similar sad results. He died fleeing his creditors and, as always, writing and publishing. Although West devotes most of this big book's latter half to synopses--with more extrapolation than exegesis in them--of the novels and the Tour and seems not to have done any original research, he writes splendidly, reanimating Defoe and his genuinely turbulent era (seventeenth-century England, in particular, was as brutal and dangerous as contemporary Bosnia) in a smart and engrossing popular biography. --Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
It's not surprising that West, an Englishman and the veteran author of numerous books on history and travel, is an admirer of "the fertility of Defoe's brain as well as the physical strength of his writing hand." West's life of the prolific if unconventional journalist who invented so much of his nonfiction that he moved easily into the novel, begins rather stiffly but becomes livelier as Defoe (1660-1731) grows up, writes more and gets into more trouble. West concedes at the start that he has not written "a definitive, academic, or even scholarly analysis of Defoe's writing." Nor has he produced a biography, he confesses, to replace Paula Backschneider's far more substantial Daniel Defoe (1989). Rather, inspired by Defoe's semifictional three-volume A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain (to West the writer's masterpiece), he turns to Defoe's neglected, often imaginative travel books and the author's equally slighted run of lively and pioneering news-and-gossip papers of 1704-13. West's life, then, is for readers who want to know more about the compulsive writer, royal secret agent and bankrupt London merchant than the author of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and his pseudo-histories and pseudo-memoirs. Defoe's method, West contends, was "the exercise of imaginationquite a different thing from invention or lying." Much more than a political pamphleteer and political spy, or the tireless hack penning bogus autobiographies, Defoe emerges in West's colorful (if sourceless) biography as an adventurer whose authentic life might have made his best book. 16 pages of b&w illustrations. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
West, a journalist and travel writer, provides a nonscholarly yet detailed and sympathetic biography of Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), an author who was also adept at journalism, pamphleteering, and fiction and travel literature. Known today for such novels as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Defoe was initially famous for his polemical writings on politics, religion, and social issues. West also details 17th- and 18th-century England, andthough readers may periodically feel inundated by the wealth of informationestablishes the political and social climate that shaped Defoe's life and literature. By the end, readers will feel compelled to return to the works discussed. Recommended for all public and academic libraries; those that have the more scholarly biography by Paula Backscheider (Daniel Defoe: His Life, LJ 10/15/89) will want to add West's book for readers who desire a more popular overview of Defoe's career and written achievements.Morris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll. Lib., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Charming urbanity and a keen historical imagination characterize this biography of the writer who not only helped invent the novel, but did much to shape the modern newspaper and the modern political campaign. West (Tito, 1995), a well-traveled veteran British journalist, begins his life of Defoe by describing how he became fascinated, 30-odd years ago, by that author's travelogue A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain. What West offers here is a tour through British history during Defoes lifetime, a journey that extends from the Great Fire of 1666 through the Glorious Revolution and Hanoverian Succession and thence into the 1720s, when the elderly Defoe, having published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, continued to produce fiction masterpieces. What makes this tour possible is the fact that Defoe was intimately involved in the crucial events of his day. He served Robert Harley and other key ministers as a secret agent, publicist, and all-around factotum, while publishing, in a series of newspapers and tracts, crucial articles on issues of trade, religious rights, foreign affairs, and Anglo-Scots unity. West freely acknowledges that he relies on a few outdated monumental histories of the period (Macaulay, Trevelyan, Churchill) and on Paula Backsheiders recent academic biography of Defoe. More seriously, he does not display an awareness of recent controversies over just how many of the works attributed to him Defoe actually wrote. Yet West is clearly an aficionado of English history, and whatever he lacks in scholarly expertise he makes up for with the empathy that he evinces for his fellow journalists travails, which included several jailings for bankruptcy and a famous spell in the pillory. Wests closing chapters on the novels and the Tour tend towards summary, but contain quite moving passages of imaginative sympathy with the author. Not a definitive biography, but rather an endearingly personal one that opens up a window on the soul of a writer who experienced firsthand much of what was vital in his time. (8 pages illustrations, not seen)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
