Rating: 
Summary: Highly recommended, with a small caveat
Review: I was fully absorbed in this book from beginning to end. Tomalin's biography of Samuel Pepys is very well researched and laid out, and very well-written, with plenty of background and post-diary information on the many personalities in Pepys' diary. She has a tendency, however, to impose modern values on 17th century behavior; for example, describing Pepys's behavior with "little Mrs. Tooker" as "sexual abuse", speculating that the girl was pre-adolescent, apparently only because Pepys referred to her as a "child", even while admitting that her age at the time is unknown. I doubt even the philandering Pepys, with many of his Puritan sensibilities still intact, would have involved himself with a pre-pubescent girl. There were standards, although they were different from today's standards; a girl was considered legally marriageable at age 12, and his own wife was just shy of her 15th birthday on their wedding day. Tomalin does point this out, so I don't know why she felt it necessary to call it "sexual abuse" and mention that Pepys would be in jail if he did the same thing today. The different standards are so obvious that I don't feel like those comments were necessary.
To be fair, Tomalin doesn't do as much judging the past by today's standards as many other historians do, and when she does do it, it's not very hard to read "around" her comments and get to the facts, especially since I had already read the diary for myself. I would recommend this book to any fan of Pepys, or of the Restoration period, or of naval history. I would also recommend those who like this book, who haven't read the diary, to read the diary, in as unabridged a version as you can lay your hands on.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent, well-rounded bio
Review: In "Samuel Pepys: An Unequaled Self," Claire Tomalin succeeds in giving the reader a very thorough, meticulously documented, and delightfully unbiased view of the life of the world's most famous diarist. Though I have not read the diaries myself, I didn't find it detrimental to my enjoyment of the book. In fact, I think this biography could make an excellent precursor to reading the diary, as Tomalin sheds a tremendous light on the life and times of the second half of the seventeenth century, and helps place the diary within a much wider historical context, (especially for those like myself who have not studied much about the Restoration previously.) Unlike others who have reviewed this book, I found the sections about Pepys life after the diary equally fascinating. Tomalin, who empathizes with her subject frequently, but never falls into the trap of blind worship, does a wonderful job of placing the details about post-diary Pepys that can be gleaned from official documents and correspondence, and imbuing it with the kind of life and insight that can be discovered through the diary sections. Not to mention, the section about the kidney stone operation will undoubtedly make even the most stoic of men cross their legs and cringe. Well worth a read!
Rating:
Summary: An excellent, well-rounded bio
Review: In "Samuel Pepys: An Unequaled Self," Claire Tomalin succeeds in giving the reader a very thorough, meticulously documented, and delightfully unbiased view of the life of the world's most famous diarist. Though I have not read the diaries myself, I didn't find it detrimental to my enjoyment of the book. In fact, I think this biography could make an excellent precursor to reading the diary, as Tomalin sheds a tremendous light on the life and times of the second half of the seventeenth century, and helps place the diary within a much wider historical context, (especially for those like myself who have not studied much about the Restoration previously.) Unlike others who have reviewed this book, I found the sections about Pepys life after the diary equally fascinating. Tomalin, who empathizes with her subject frequently, but never falls into the trap of blind worship, does a wonderful job of placing the details about post-diary Pepys that can be gleaned from official documents and correspondence, and imbuing it with the kind of life and insight that can be discovered through the diary sections. Not to mention, the section about the kidney stone operation will undoubtedly make even the most stoic of men cross their legs and cringe. Well worth a read!
Rating:
Summary: Samuel Pepys
Review: In high school, when excerpts of the Pepys diary were assigned to my senior English class, I admit that I culled them only for their notoriously spicy parts. For the substance, I relied on Cliff's Notes. Later, in college, I tackled the diary in earnest, wishing that I had been more serious with it in high school. Samuel Pepys would have been a member of history without his famous diary, and Tomalin's book shows us why. He was one of history's first self-made men (the sort of man whom Franklin, over 100 years later, would have approved), rising from the son of a tailor to the highest ranks of post-Restoration England. In doing so, he deftly navigates the treacherous political landscape, managing to sufficiently gloss over his republican past and ingratiate himself to Charles II. Through his careful administration of the navy, Pepys became the hero to later naval administrators. He was also a member of the Royal Society and, later, of parliament. Of course, Pepys was also a scoundrel, a cheat, and shameless groper of any woman unlucky enough to be caught alone with him. Many of his exploits were captured in the diary, in which his self-fascination is rendered as disinterested, clear prose. Pepys writes about himself as a hired psychologist might write about a patient. He seems to live for more and better material for his diary; or, as Tomalin puts it, "Pepys the man gave Pepys the writer all the material he needed." Both Pepys the man and Pepys the writer are in good hands with Tomalin. She handles her subject with just the right amount of feminist disdain. She chides him for his "sexual assaults" and his overall frailties. But can there be total detachment on the part of the biographer from her subject? If anything, especially toward the end of the book, Tomalin has fallen for the very pathos she herself has created for Pepys. This is a worthy biography. Anyone remotely interested in Pepys (or, for that matter, a lively and thoroughly researched history of post-Restoration England) should seek out this book.
Rating:
Summary: The unequalled biography
Review: Pepys is lucky to have Claire Tomalin as his biographer. She is objective but sympathetic, thoughtful, analytic, and writes with an easy, fluid style. At times she lets Pepys speak for himself, through excerpts from his diary and letters, while at other times she recounts events in a seamless narrative fashion that, from reading the diary alone, would be more opaque and even somewhat choppy. In other words, she fills in the gaps, explaining who's who and providing background information about selected people and events that Pepys naturally felt no need to describe.
Pepys led a colorful life, which Tomalin does her best to illuminate. The core of her book is, of course, the years 1660-1669, during which he wrote his famously candid diary. Given that he also left behind volumes of letters in the more than 30 years more that he lived, it's a bit surprising that she doesn't present more information from those letters. Without the rich detail of the diary, the second half of his life is presented in a more perfunctory manner, including his three arrests and one brief imprisonment in the Tower. Her quotes from the diary are more sparse than they might have been, too. I assume she was willing to let the diary speak for itself -- and the interested reader who has not read the diary would be well advised to do so, because its rewards are only hinted at in this biography.
Tomalin made another assumption in writing her book, namely, that the reader would have at least a passing familiarity with English history, particularly the Restoration era. Many events are not fully explained, such as the reasons for the war with the Dutch, or indeed how warfare was declared, conducted, and concluded in the 17th century, which might have been helpful. And she is unable to elucidate exactly what Pepys did at the office all day and often into the night, although his contributions to improving the Navy are adequately sketched. It's curious that, once she has covered the Great Fire of 1666, she doesn't make a single reference to the rebuilding of London (aside from one very slight allusion), although reconstruction surely was a significant part of the background of everyday life for the ten years it took the city to restore itself. The diary contains a number of references. (For a full account of the disaster and recovery, see Adrian Tinniswood's By Permission of Heaven: The True Story of the Great Fire of London.)
Tomalin sticks closely to the man himself, his career and personal life. As every biographer has a right to do, she favors those aspects that most interest her: the arc of his rise from near-poverty to wealth and influence; the ups and downs of his marriage to a wife he loves but never bothers to name in the diary; his personal honesty and disclosure of his own flaws, particularly his willingness to take bribes and his wandering eye; his observations of the licentious court of Charles II; the continuing influence of a Puritan upbringing and education on his worldly career; his friendships and enmities; the things that brought him pleasure, such as books and music and chasing women, and the things that made him anxious, such as the possible exposure of his shadier dealings and the problems with his eyesight that eventually forced him to abandon the diary; and his unflagging zest for life and experience. For those who choose to read Richard Le Gallienne's admirable but bowdlerized abridgment of the diary, which is one-eighth the length of the original, Tomalin's biography fills in some gaps and also provides information about persons named in Le Gallienne's edition, which, frustratingly, contains no notes at all.
Even if you haven't read the diary, Tomalin's biography of Samuel Pepys stands alone as an intimate portrait of an intelligent, curious, flawed human being and the tumultuous times he lived in.
Rating:
Summary: A Complex Man for Complex Times
Review: Samuel Pepys was a man of some standing in his own times- part of what we would today call the establishment. He was a senior government official with responsibility for the Navy (the biggest spending government department in his day), a Member of Parliament, on speaking terms with two kings (Charles II and James II), President of the Royal Society and an Elder Brother of Trinity House. It is not, however, any of these achievements which have made him a household name, but rather his famous diary, which gives us such a vivid picture of both his life and his times. Had he not kept a diary, it is unlikely that his name would be known today except to historians of the seventeenth century navy and to those who are, like me, members of Magdalene College, Cambridge. (Pepys was a student at the college and its best-known benefactor; one of the college buildings is named after him). This presents a problem to any biographer of Pepys. Although he lived for seventy years, from 1633 to 1703, his diary covers only the nine years between 1660 and 1669. (He abandoned it because of fears about his eyesight). We therefore know a great deal about a period covering just under one seventh of his total lifespan, and much less about the remaining six sevenths. As might be expected, therefore, this book covers the 1660s in much greater detail than it does the rest of his life. Fortunately, that decade, the decade of the Restoration, the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, was not only one of the most eventful in English history, but also the most important in Pepys's life, as it saw him rise from a minor clerk in government service to being a high official of the State. One of the main attractions of the diary, however, is that it deals with Pepys's private affairs (including matters that show him in a bad light), not merely with his official duties, and Ms Tomalin does not neglect this colourful side of his life. The portrait that emerges is one of a complex, contradictory figure. On the one hand, Pepys was a highly competent and hard working civil servant; on the other, he had little compunction about accepting bribes. Married to a beautiful young wife, to whom he professed devotion, he kept two long-term mistresses (Betty Martin and Mrs Bagwell) and was always ready to attempt the seduction of any other attractive woman who crossed his path. To some of his friends he showed great kindness; others he treated badly. In private, he could be disrespectful about his royal masters, yet in public he remained steadfastly loyal, even when it would have been in his interest to be otherwise. (Pepys's public career ended when he remained loyal to James II after the revolution of 1688 and refused to swear allegiance to the new King William III). When dealing with the years 1633-60 and 1669-1703, especially the earlier period, Ms Tomalin has less material to work with. Nevertheless, she succeeds in giving a good overall account of the course of Pepys's life, as well as an entertaining portrait of the times in which he lived. That period, for the modern reader, can be as contradictory as the man himself; at times the men and women of the seventeenth century seem surprisingly modern, at others they bear out the truth of the dictum about the past being another country where they do things differently. I was surprised, for example, by the description of Pepys's operation for a kidney stone; seventeenth century medical knowledge and surgical techniques were clearly more advanced than I had realised. The period was also one of greater social mobility than we are often led to believe; Pepys's father was not (as I had wrongly thought) part of the landed gentry but a poor London tailor. His first cousin Edward Montagu, however, was a wealthy and influential landowning magnate, made an earl by Charles II for the part he played in the Restoration. The religious and political struggles of the time, however, can often seem very alien from a modern viewpoint. Even when we understand them at an intellectual level, it can be difficult to have much sympathy with either side. The traditional Whig interpretation of history, of course, viewed the period as marking the birth of English constitutional liberty, but this seems today to be, at best, a half-truth. Certainly, Charles II and James II can appear at times as quasi-mediaeval despots, trying vainly to hold on to their arbitrary power in the face of a nascent democracy. At others, however, they seem more like enlightened philosopher kings, defending toleration and liberty of conscience against a parliament of bigots who valued no freedom more highly than the freedom to persecute others. (It may have been this aspect of their character that inspired Pepys's loyalty to the Stuart dynasty; he shared a certain religious scepticism with Charles, although not with James who was a devout Catholic). It is to Ms Tomalin's credit that she contents herself with giving the political background to Pepys's career and does not try to advance one historical interpretation at the expense of another (even though her subject was himself very much a Tory). This is, in fact, in many ways a fair, well-balanced book that I can recommend to anyone who is seeking an introduction to the colourful life of Samuel Pepys or who has an interest in seventeenth century history.
Rating: 
Summary: Pepys Exposed
Review: Samuel Pepys, the world's greatest diarist, was a lower-middle-class kid whose intelligence was spotted early by a family patron, was given an education, found a job in the world's biggest city, and shot to the top of his field. Pepys became the British Navy's ablest and most articulate civil servant, this over the time when the Navy fought its three epic wars against Holland. But there have been many civil servants; what made Pepys famous was his diary: as Tomason notes, few if any writers in history have had the ability to lay themselves (and their surroundings) bare with such brutal directness. In his diaries we discover his tempestuous marriage, his many infatuations, his petty jealousies and his closeted republican views. (Republican would actually be too strong a word; suffice it to say he was born a puritan Cromwellian sympathizer, and, through sheer fortuity, became one of the pillars of the Stuart Restoration.) Tomason has dissected other great English writers before, notably Jane Austen, but she and Pepys seem to be particularly sympatico.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best English biographers at her very best
Review: The only living English biographers I can think of who are in any way comparable to Claire Tomalin are Richard Holmes and Peter Ackroyd, and of the three I am not sure if Tomalin isn't the best. Certainly she is the most compulsively readable: she has a fine ability to clarify confusing historical matters and offer a clear and compelling narrative line. This book on Samuel Pepys, her latest work, shows Tomalin at her very best. Pepys lived through (and was an important witness to) some of the most complex and drmaatic changes in British history--the Civil War, the Restoration, the Great Plague of London, the Great Fire, and the Glorious Revolution--and Tomalin presents them all so clearly and simply it's a bit of a wonder. Her work is animated by her great admiration and fondness her subjects, Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys. She never shirks in showing their many faults (Pepys's sexual compulsiveness with other women, both Pepys's physical violence towards each other and their servants) but she is also very attuned to what remarkable people they were, and how they jointly contributed (Pepys directly, Elizabeth indirectly) to one of the most remarable documents of all time: Pepys's great diary, the first great record of the Enlightenment self. I could not put this book down!
Rating:
Summary: An Unequaled Biography
Review: This biography fully deserves all the praise it has been getting: it is intelligent, sympathetic to its subject without being worshipful, and the language is fresh. Pepys was an important public figure in his day and reading about him, one learns a lot about English history in the second half of the seventeenth century. Best of all, Tomalin succeeds in bringing him and his times very much to life without in any way compromising the great distance between his age - which was as close to the Middle Ages as to us - and our own. Tomalin, clearly, is engaged largely by Pepys as diarist. Unfortunately for her, and for her biography, Pepys lived almost forty years after putting his diary aside, and her treatment of this part of his life - that is, most of it - is dutiful (and dealt with in 100 pages, only a quarter of the book) rather than inspired. This book is, nonetheless, an admirable achievement by any standard, and a great pleasure to read.
Rating:
Summary: Best bio ever written of Pepys
Review: This one is and I've read them all. Tomalin chooses diary excerpts brilliantly, tying together a picture of the man in his own words that captures the spirit of the diary and other materials (letters and so on) perfectly. Then she wraps it all into the context of the fascinating times in which Pepys lived and gives us rich introductions to those who shared his life and world. This book is a MUST READ for anyone who likes Pepys. Anyone who doesn't know Pepys will run right out and buy the 11-volume version of the diary after reading this book.
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