Publisher's Weekly Review
Kershaw, a Los Angeles-based English journalist, writes that by the time London was 39, in early 1915, "the muses had indeed deserted Jack." Actually, London seems to have deserted his muses, producing what many considered alcohol-inspired claptrap about violent men and their women intended for quick sale. Even under the influence of John Barleycorn, he usually managed his thousand words a day, writing hundreds of fact pieces, short stories and 20 novels. A fewCall of the Wild, Sea Wolf and Martin Edenwere memorable enough to turn the one-time sailor and laborer into a literary celebrity. Ultimately, he was reduced to purchasing plots to exploit from an aspiring young writer named Sinclair Lewis. London has inspired numerous biographies, though with this work, Kershaw adds little to London's life but clichés ("Jack had... fallen from dizzying heights to rock bottom"). Although writing for an American audience, he uses British spellings ("tyres," "cheque") and lapses into language that would have embarrassed his mostly self-taught subject ("a boy who weighed less than him"; "intellectual ideas"). London, who died at 40, very likely of self-administered morphine while in the agonies of terminal uremia, suffers again in this latest life. Photos. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Another tame biographer lamely follows the call of Jack London's wild life. Kershaw, like many London biographers, suffers from an anxiety of reference, which started with the subject himself. London's bestselling versions of his life established him as not merely the California-bred, Klondike-hardened creator of the classic boys' adventure stories White Fang and The Call of the Wild, but also a celebrity--adventurer, drinker, sailor, war correspondent, socialist, revolutionary, though never wholly any of these. A self-educated literary Ragged Dick, London found his authorial calling after enduring miserable poverty, factory jobs, and rough living as a wharf rat, oyster-bed raider, and seal hunter. Rising mainly by obsessive determination, he would chum out reams of short stories, muck-raking articles, socialist tracts, and general ephemera before his death in 1924 at age 40. Adding to this voluminous output, his second wife, Charmian, would devote two volumes to him, The Book of Jack London, and his elder daughter by his failed first marriage, Joan, tried to work out their difficult relationship in Jack London and His Daughters, as well as a full-scale biography. Without making any contribution of his own, Kershaw, a contributing editor to GQ, patches together his work from these sources, as well as the two main London biographies, Irving Stone's romantic Sailor on Horseback(1938) and Richard O'Connor's stolid Jack London: A Biography (1964). The result mixes novelistic scenes and reconstructed dialogue with half-digested research and Cliff Notes summaries of London's works. Nowhere is there any real analysis of his contradictory character--the passionate socialist would take yellow journalism assignments from Hearst, his socialism was overshadowed by his social Darwinism--nor any significant attempt, aside from local color, to place him in the context of his wild times. In trying to track down the real Jack London, Kershaw retraces everyone else's footsteps. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Few readers today are cognizant of the tremendous range of Jack London's works, an epic list of novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction. London's life, though only 40 years in duration, was jam-packed with adventure and embodied the spirit of places as far-flung as the Yukon and the South Pacific. Kershaw's straight-ahead portrait of London is utterly absorbing, beginning, as it does, with the observation that London, forced to work in a cannery to support his family, never had a boyhood. He despised factory work and soon found his way to sea, drinking, brawling, and risking his life in pursuit of freedom. Books were his most trustworthy companions, and London began writing, as he did everything else, at a precocious age. Kershaw adeptly connects London's extraordinary experiences hoboing, prospecting, and seafaring with his books, from his treasured tales of Alaska to his chronicle of the drinking life, John Barleycorn, and many forgotten novels, assessing, in the process, London's inconsistent politics, troubled personal life, and unshakeable commitment to his craft. Kershaw is right; it's time to reacquaint ourselves with this most American of authors and to renew our appreciation. --Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
Written with verve in a direct and emphatic style, this most recent biography of the legendary California-born adventurer and author of The Call of the Wild may prompt a reassessment of London, as its author hopes. Kershaw describes London's emotionally and materially disenfranchised early years as an oyster pirate on the San Francisco waterfront and Klondike adventurer to account for his conflicting lifelong adherence to both Darwinism and socialism. Kershaw also discusses the writer's nourishing relationship with Charmian Kittredge, London's obsessive long-distance travel, his costly attempts to create an environmentally friendly model at his Beauty Ranch, and the drinking and ill health that led up to his death at 40. Preferring living to writing, London nonetheless drove himself to write 1000 words a day. Yet this life reveals that all the money and celebrity that eventually came his way did nothing but starve London's soul, leaving him a broken man with only a reputation as a writer of dog stories. Kershaw's reassessment sees beyond the legend and examines neglected London works. Recommended for all libraries.Charles Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.