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Summary: Your Typical Bloated Blustery Politician Looter
Review: This Pulitzer-Prize winner is a great book, an astounding outflow of words that meander from delicate beauty to gut-punch brutality, particularly when dealing with machinations in the political arena.It is a riveting exploration of the rise and demise of Willie Stark, a loosely-disguised Huey Long, a Southern politician of the traditional confiscate-from-the-rich-and-buy-votes-from-the-poor school of governance. Here's a blustery mogul who assures everyone he just wants to help poor folks, yet he treats most of the people around him like dirt. He weilds power by breaking people, digging up dirt and blackmailing them, a good example of the politics of personal destruction that our recent real-life First Felon whined about so pitifully (while employing those very techniques every chance he got). Willie gives great speeches, the old-fashioned stump sermons that were rendered before television scared politicians into hiding their real personalities. Willie speaks from the heart to his constituents, performing for them, making them mad, making them laugh, making them LISTEN. Reading this makes you yearn for just one contemporary politician who would address people in such a manner. It would be such a refreshing change from all those podium lemmings who continually grovel in search of sound bytes. Willie vows to do good for all the poor folks who love him -- and, of course, his only means for doing that is to loot earned income from people who were foolish enough to be productive. Willie is the master of doing good with other people's money. He'd fit right in, with our Congress today. In the end, Willie got what he deserved. I just wish it had happened to him a lot earlier.
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Summary: You Have the Whole World Willie Stark
Review: As a California-based mystery novelist with Southern roots stretching back many generations, I was raised hearing from my father about the great things Huey Long accomplished in Louisiana--the schools, the universities, the roads, the bridges, and the hospitals. Dad never mentioned the quasi-police state the populist governor established while he ruled Louisiana. While in college, I first read Robert Penn Warren's fictionalized treatment of the founder of the Long Dynasty. ALL THE KING'S MEN tells the story of Willie Stark, an initially idealistic small-town pol who learns how to win big by losing first. Jack Burden, Stark's idealistic hatchetman, narrates the tale and shows the reader how Willie becomes slowly corrupted by wealth, power, and ego. I've read this book many times, and each time I find myself fascinated by the moral ambiguities of the Stark character. Willie got into politics to do good. Even at the end, he still believes he is on the side of right battling the forces of evil. In his novel, Robert Penn Warren wrote, I contend, the most perceptive biography of Huey Long ever written. ALL THE KING'S MEN is a literary landmark of the last century.
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Summary: One of my all-time favorite books
Review: This book is simply a treasure. Robert Penn Warren is well known as a poet and the prose of All the King's Men often approaches the level of poetry in its beauty. The story is wonderfully composed, with striking characters and deep insight into American politics and the human character. It would be wrong to consider this an accurate portrait of the historical Huey Long, but Warren has used the historical basis to create an outstanding work of fiction. I could not give a book any higher review.
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Summary: Setting the tone for the end of the century...
Review: I was never forced to read this book in school, and had only picked it up (secondhand) because the title had lodged itself in the back of my mind. I'm glad to have discovered it. I'm a fan of Salinger, and Pynchon, and Heller, and most anyone who writes of the (probably passe by now) moral ambivilance of the modern world. Whatever you may think of the stance taken by these authors, I think you will find, as I have found, that this book anticipates that attitude, one which I had always associated with the late 1950's. Reading "All the Kings Men" has given me much insight into the great books which came later, as I consider how those authors must have thought and felt, creating their work with Mr. Warren hanging over them. "All the Kings Men" is a fabulous work, and I'm not sure that its treatment of ethics has been surpassed by those which came after.
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Summary: the film version won a lot of oscars...
Review: but the book is the way to go...the unofficial "biography" of louisiana governor huey long....i read this book when i was a senior in college; it is one of those books that makes you glad you love reading and will deepen your appreciation of literature... willie stark started out wanting to do good for the people but was destroyed by his ulterior motives and treachery... the story of jack burden is equally fascinating as it sometimes paralells stark's, but takes twists and turns all its own...even if you don't love politics, you'll still love this book...the perfect graph for understanding human nature and for finding out why people do dirt...
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Summary: Great American Novel
Review: Robert Penn Warren, who in 1986 was named the nation's first Poet Laureate, won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for this tremendous novel. It is my personal pick for the Great American Novel and I would place it just below Orwell on the Top 100 of the 20th Century list. Most will be familiar with it's Huey Long derived tale of the rise and fall of populist politician Willie Stark. Jack Burden, the narrator, is a newspaperman who hitches himself to Stark's rising star. Eventually, Stark calls on Burden to get the goods on the lilly white Judge Irwin, the surrogate father of Jack's youth and a man of widely acknowledged rectitude: Jack: But suppose there isn't anything to find. Stark: There is always something. Jack: Maybe not on the Judge. Stark: Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink to the diddie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something. Sure enough, Jack digs until he finds the ugly truth and unleashes a series of shocking revelations and tragic deaths. I'm sure that this must seem too cynical to some, but it is actually a marvelous retelling of the essential Puritan democratic myth that informs the American system. Politics after all is nothing but a system of choices about how some men will wield power over other men. All of the choices are bad, but the alternative--the lawless State of Nature--is worse and so we try to make the best bad choices possible. But we must remain ever vigilant against those who wield power over us & noone is more dangerous than the populist or the do-gooder who cloaks himself in the mantle of the Good & the Right. FDR and his New Deal come hand in glove with interring the Japanese Americans and packing the Supreme Court. LBJ and Civil Rights are accompanied by profound personal corruption and Viet Nam. And, of course, when you elect the purely evil, you get Detente + Watergate or the Health Care Plan + Monica + Chinagate, etc. The only politicians who are even mildly trustworthy are those who renounce the very powers of government--George Washington, William McKinley, Calvin Coolidge, Eisenhower & Reagan. This is a book that John Adams would have loved and you will too. GRADE: A+
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Summary: Well written, accurate representation of Lousiana politics!
Review: I read this book my junior year of highschool, for English class. It was a very well written book, and it is very accurate about Louisiana politics. I will be honest, it isn't the most exciting book in the world. The chapters are at least 50 pages long each, but I really liked the style in which the author wrote, and I found it a very good book. If you need a lot of action to keep you going with a book, this isn't the book for you. But if you are looking for something more for its style, then this is definitely a good thing to check out. It also gives you a good perspective on Lousiana politics.
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Summary: Warren knows his readers.
Review: In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren proves he knows more about writing than just the simple mechanics. Strongly defined characters and a setting so real you can taste the air provide the foundation for this literary masterpiece, yet the real genius of the book is in Warren's understanding of the reader and his use of style to convey a personal tone in the reading. The main characters in All the King's Men are Jack Burden and Willie Stark. Jack, the narrator, was a reporter before joining Stark's bid for political power. Stark began as a small country lawyer who saw something wrong and tried to change it, but he eventually becomes a politician in the truest sense, so much so that the narrator can only think of Stark as "the Boss," an ominous title indeed. Accompanying these two men is an array of equally fascinating minor characters such as Sadie, a saucy married woman influential in developing Stark's position as a politician, and Sugar Boy, an Irishman so named for his affinity for sugar. Every character has depth and realism and can stand alone as a fully-developed individual. While the characters are clearly an enjoyable part of the story, the setting is even more compelling. Warren's word choice is superb; he chooses to include and omit just the right combination of words to paint a realistic picture in the reader's mind without becoming too cumbersome. It is a balance few authors are able to achieve with such proficiency and yet another way in which Warren demonstrates his almost supernatural understanding of the reader. The best part is, it only gets better. If characters and setting can be described as masterfully crafted, then Warren's grasp of tone is inexplicable. Simply put, the story truly speaks to the reader and could never have been as effective were it written any other way. Sentence structure, word selection, and dialect coalesce into a tangible atmosphere that projects a strong sense of familiarity onto the reader. The book is hard to put down because of this sense of familiarity. Overall, All the King's Men is a book enjoyable in many more ways than one, with intriguing characters, realistic setting, and a true understanding of the needs of the reader. Even after fifty years, this book remains a classic appealing to all generations.
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Summary: Fascinating
Review: All the King's Men is a beautifully written book which gives us a fascinating look at the interior workings of one man's political dreams, and how he tries to accomplish them. The novel gives us a glimpse into the underhanded, controlling, backstab-your-own-kin tactics of politicians and their cronies, and that is always enjoyable. Sometimes the book becomes a bit long and plodding, but other times it is a pageturner. And, as I said before, Warren writes with a beautiful turn of phrase.
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Summary: A phenomenally well written book
Review: Although I was supposed to have read this back in high school American lit class or maybe it was college American lit, I had not remembered it at all. I ate through it during a couple of weekends of lazing about the patio on sunny afternoons. To someone with a certain interest but not fascination with American politics, this was still an incredible piece of writing. It deserves to be considered one of the quintessential Great American Novels. It was also surprisingly timeless. Written by the Pulitzer Prize-Winner, Warren in 1946, with the exception of occasional allusions to current events, this novel was as relevant and readable today as it must have been over fifty years ago. The novel traces the rise and fall of a fictional governor of Louisiana whose profile, most recognize, is that of the infamous Huey Long. I came away from it with two impressions: Robert Penn Warren's prose is absolutely beautiful (he was the country's first Poet Laureate and I see clearly why), and two, I have never spoken to anyone or read anything that would encourage me to travel to Louisiana, and this book drove the last nail in that coffin.
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