Booklist Review
Gr. 6-12. "I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt": Eric Blair (later, George Orwell) believed what the kids at boarding school told him, and for years he thought he would never succeed at anything. The quotes in this literary biography are like booktalks, luring you to the original stories and essays. Flynn focuses on Orwell's work much more than on his personal life--family, friends, and wives come up only in passing--but Orwell wrote so plainly about himself and his times, and about how and why he wrote, that teens who know Animal Farm and 1984 will want to look up some of his autobiographical writing, too. Part of the Life and Works series, this is a photo-essay with a profusion of well-captioned black-and-white pictures on nearly every page. Included are a chronology, glossary, list of works with dates, bibliography, and index. Other new volumes in the series--on Conrad, Dickens, Eliot, Mansfield, and Woolf--are listed in the Series Roundup, in this issue. ~--Hazel Rochman
