Review by Choice Review
Duriez has written several books on Tolkien and Lewis, many overlapping in content: C.S. Lewis Handbook (1990), expanded as The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia (2002); The J.R.R. Tolkien Handbook (1992), reprinted as part of Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings (2001); The Inklings Handbook, written with David Porter (2001). But this dual biography seems fairly fresh: Duriez mined "The Lewis Family Papers," an unpublished collection edited by W.H. Lewis and housed in Wheaton [Illinois] College's Marion E. Wade Center; four recorded interviews (also at the Wade Center); and some unpublished letters for new material. Duriez makes a few slips: e.g., he says that Lewis's only gift to Tolkien's writing of The Lord of the Rings was encouragement, but Tolkien said (in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. by Humphrey Carpenter, CH, Feb'82) that Lewis pointed out passages that needed rewriting and Tolkien revised them. Duriez tries to popularize the book with fictional chapter openings (with sources given in the endnotes). The competition--still the best treatment--is Humphrey Carpenter's excellent The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (1978), which is biographical in emphasis. Duriez's book is a popular, not a scholarly study. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Lower-division undergraduates and general readers. J. R. Christopher emeritus, Tarleton State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
The two most successful twentieth-century English fantasists were friends from shortly after their 1926 meeting until the younger's death. Both fought in World War I, in which all but one of Tolkien's dearest school friends died, and Lewis lost a buddy whose mother he thereafter cared for, as promised, until her 1951 death. As young Oxford dons, they discovered they shared a love of medieval northern European literature and, after Lewis (1898-1963), greatly aided by Tolkien (1892-1973), converted to Christianity, a common faith. Lewis' great aid to Tolkien was to encourage unflaggingly the development of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien reciprocated Lewis' supportiveness for Lewis' fiction and scholarship but was too conservative a Catholic to approve of the low-church Anglican Lewis' popular Christian evangelical writings and especially his limited toleration of divorce, which apparently seemed adventitious even to Lewis when he married divorceeoy Davidman and never told Tolkien. In a graceful, sympathetic, and appealing dual biography, Duriez stresses their influences on one another and the depths of their friendship. --Ray Olson Copyright 2003 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
