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Rating: 
Summary: boring and strangely subjective tone
Review: Frankly, the book is long, costs a lot, and is boring. I would rather spend $20 on learning about Africa than reading a biographer who keeps an odd tone through the book that I would associate more with a polemic than with a balanced biography. I think ok when Joe Campbell died how creepy people came out of the woodword who had been jealous of his fame, and said creepy envy-ridden things about him that some who had an ax to grind took up as fact. I think this author does the same. The minuntae in the book is deadening. This book is in that style, petty gossip that the author inflates into many pages to slap a high price on the volume. I would suspect this book would not have been published if it didn't play on so much gossip. I would reather reaad Van der Post's books firsthand and decide for myself
Rating: 
Summary: More Tales?
Review: I found this book difficult to put down. It is very well written and impressively researched. The light it throws onto the times, places and people spanned by the life of Laurens van der Post are valuable indeed. But it simply is not a do-it-justice, adequately balanced biography. Even if 80 percent of the prevarication, lying, [misunderstandings], and hypocricy claimed by Jones against Van der Post is true, it simply doesn't cut it for any serious biographer to essentially attribute the profound impact of such a high quality literary figure, and half-century-long luminary, almost entirely to some quality of "charm" or honed talent to [mislead]... even some of the most sophisticated human beings of his time. Jones, of course, may deny that characterization of his work, but such is clearly the underlying impact of his ill-balanced treatment of Van der Post's life. To put it another way: to basically attribute the remarkable insightfulness, giftedness and international impact of Laurens van der Post's long and illustrious life so largely to a sort of hypnotic deceptiveness (The rather glib, satirical - or is it sarcastic? - title of the book advertizes just such a seriously limiting thesis) comes close to producing a biography that borders on a species of shallowness, even if the author claims that he wrote the book largely to disclose these realities. Of course Laurens had serious flaws, and I sincerely thank Mr. Jones for opening my eyes more fully to that fact; but to make such faultiness, serious as some of it is, the unrelenting theme of an "authorized biography" (see Foreword) on the life of a man as complex and obviously outstanding as Van der Post, is not to write a biography fully worthy of the art and science of biography writing, at least as I and many others might understand it. There are literally miriads of places to which one could go in Jones' book that call for alternative conjectures about the "facts," true or not, that Jones cites; alternative, that is, to Jones'monotonously predictable conclusion, page after page, that Laurens was invariably the consummate international and personal con man. But the tasteless, anecdotal quip Janet Campbell, Laurens' housekeeper, claims to have made to a "very old" Van der Post, that is quoted in the first sentence of the Introduction to Jones' book is quite damningly pace-setting for the book as a whole: That Laurens should remember he was, after all "just a farm boy from the Karoo." Is that really all he was? It's no wonder such a characterization is said to have "incensed" him. Once the book is read, it is almost inescapable to conclude that this describes pretty much how Jones would like to reduce the life of Laurens van der Post. And if a reader accepts the clear implication of this kind of "logic" (a species of implied hubris expressed elsewhere in the book) there'd be a lot of people who'd have to be stricken from the rosters of the great among us: Abraham Lincoln (back woods, log cabin, and all), Jesus Christ ("Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?") and William Shakespeare (son of a merchant in a diminutive village). All in all, it seems to me that J.D.F. Jones' approach to the on-balance greatness of the life of Laurens van der Post, is archtypical of the malady crouching in the spirit of contemporary, civilized humanity (mine included!); the malady Laurens van der Post himself so insightfully exposed: that developed human beings today are so "civilized," so "objectivistic," so "rationalistic," so starry-eyed about the capacities of research that we are left virtually untrusting of, and therefore unmoved by our own intuitive, spiritual and "primitive" powers. We have therefore become largely incapable of perceiving, or have lost much of our capacity to experience anything except that which we are able to skeptically and even cynically squint at through eyes only part way open. This, I'm afraid, describes much of the reason for J.D.F. Jones' inadequate, or should I say, truncated but brilliantly elaborate biographical "tale" of the life of Sir Laurens van der Post.
Rating:
Summary: boring and strangely subjective tone
Review: This is how the book leaves one. As a lifelong admirer of van der Post (I was even fortunate enough to briefly meet him once in New York and attend his lectures on the denigration of the feminine since the time of St. Paul, as well as the Bushman of the Kalahari myths), I have to admit I found his personal life to be quite shocking, especially his treatment of women close to him, and even more so, his total neglect of his illegitimate children, and that of his own son, John, who died prematurely in adulthood. I found the many lies surprising, but was relieved that not everything was a lie, and many of the the truths in his writing stand the test of veracity. Even if some of the Bushman myths which he claimed to have learned directly from them were myths that he read in the books of Bleek, they still are very beautiful. Most surprising is that the Mantis is not to be found in Bushman cosmology. Wherever did van der Post find this non-Bushman god whom he accredits to their culture? Oh well, he seemed to have a capacity to attract great and life-long love from others which one wonders if he could ever have returned in such proportion. His relationship with Jung was not so close that he should have called himself "Jung's messenger boy." Above all, I feel a deep sympathy for his extremely loyal wife, who was kept much in the dark about his goings on. Although she intuited there was another woman (though not that they had had a 30 years affair, or that there were many others as well), and knew of at least one of his illegitimate children, she said she was not jealous. If you read her autobiography, "The Way Things Happen," the last two chapters actually written by Laurens van der Post as she had fallen into her dementia by then), much is revealing. For instance, she notes that she was aware of her first husband's (Jimmy Young) affairs, and states in that book as well that she felt no jealousy, but believed that was in the area of his reckoning with himself and was his own business. Her book is a fine one, from her childhood in India, her great love of her second husband, her work as a playwright and then after six month's study at the Jungian Institute in Zurich, her work as a not fully trained psychoanalyst (she had some professional meetings with Prince Charles, while Diana, Princess of Wales, had several sessions with van der Post's close friend and analyst, Dr. Alan McGlashan), up to her old age. Unlike van der Post, Jung was honest with his wife about Toni Wolff. They all learned to live with it. But then, he was not a habitual liar. Ingaret thought of her husband as "a great man." I beg to disagree. Though I respect him for staying with her during her last years when she had sunk into dementia, instead of 'ducking out,' as he had a tendency to quickly do in sticky situations. Jung was perhaps a great man. In my opinion, van der Post excelled in his non-fiction works. I do not think he reached any great heights in his books of fiction. But over and above all his faults and problems, he gave us the African myths one way or the other. And this helped some of us with our lives.
Rating: 
Summary: DISILLUSIONING, YET COMPASSIONATE!
Review: This is how the book leaves one. As a lifelong admirer of van der Post (I was even fortunate enough to briefly meet him once in New York and attend his lectures on the denigration of the feminine since the time of St. Paul, as well as the Bushman of the Kalahari myths), I have to admit I found his personal life to be quite shocking, especially his treatment of women close to him, and even more so, his total neglect of his illegitimate children, and that of his own son, John, who died prematurely in adulthood. I found the many lies surprising, but was relieved that not everything was a lie, and many of the the truths in his writing stand the test of veracity. Even if some of the Bushman myths which he claimed to have learned directly from them were myths that he read in the books of Bleek, they still are very beautiful. Most surprising is that the Mantis is not to be found in Bushman cosmology. Wherever did van der Post find this non-Bushman god whom he accredits to their culture? Oh well, he seemed to have a capacity to attract great and life-long love from others which one wonders if he could ever have returned in such proportion. His relationship with Jung was not so close that he should have called himself "Jung's messenger boy." Above all, I feel a deep sympathy for his extremely loyal wife, who was kept much in the dark about his goings on. Although she intuited there was another woman (though not that they had had a 30 years affair, or that there were many others as well), and knew of at least one of his illegitimate children, she said she was not jealous. If you read her autobiography, "The Way Things Happen," the last two chapters actually written by Laurens van der Post as she had fallen into her dementia by then), much is revealing. For instance, she notes that she was aware of her first husband's (Jimmy Young) affairs, and states in that book as well that she felt no jealousy, but believed that was in the area of his reckoning with himself and was his own business. Her book is a fine one, from her childhood in India, her great love of her second husband, her work as a playwright and then after six month's study at the Jungian Institute in Zurich, her work as a not fully trained psychoanalyst (she had some professional meetings with Prince Charles, while Diana, Princess of Wales, had several sessions with van der Post's close friend and analyst, Dr. Alan McGlashan), up to her old age. Unlike van der Post, Jung was honest with his wife about Toni Wolff. They all learned to live with it. But then, he was not a habitual liar. Ingaret thought of her husband as "a great man." I beg to disagree. Though I respect him for staying with her during her last years when she had sunk into dementia, instead of 'ducking out,' as he had a tendency to quickly do in sticky situations. Jung was perhaps a great man. In my opinion, van der Post excelled in his non-fiction works. I do not think he reached any great heights in his books of fiction. But over and above all his faults and problems, he gave us the African myths one way or the other. And this helped some of us with our lives.
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