Books and Reading
Feb 23rd 2007
Featured Author
John le Carre’
John le Carré is the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, who was born in England in 1931. He was educated at Sherborne School, the University of Berne (where he studied German literature for a year) and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honors degree in modern languages. He taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg. He started writing novels in 1961, and since then has published twenty titles.
Several of his books were made into award winning films such as “The Constant Gardener” starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, and “The Russia House” starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer.
John le Carré remarked that he is often billed as “a spy turned writer” but states, “I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence.” He avoids the spotlight because he feels the media treat him as though he wrote “espionage handbooks”. He says, “apart from spying, I have in my time sold bath towels, got divorced, washed elephants, run away from school, decimated a flock of Welsh sheep with a twenty-five pound shell because I was too stupid to understand the gunnery officer’s instructions, taught children in a special school. It is forty years since I hung up my cloak and dagger. I wrote my first three books while I was a spook; I wrote the next seventeen after I was at large.”
Publisher’s Weekly gives a starred review for his 20th novel, “The Mission Song” published in 2006. “Amid the bursts of humor, le Carré convincingly conveys his empathy for the African nation and his cynicism at its would-be saviors…”
The Library Journal Review of “The Constant Gardener” states “Le Carre ’s ability to draw characters in depth, coupled with his unparalleled plotting and the authority with which he describes settings …makes this a propulsive narrative … and is highly recommended.”
“Absolute Friends” as reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, “The grim consequences are spelled out with a deadly fury that is startling in the context of his usual urbanity. With a largely German setting that recalls some of his earliest books, as well as the same embracing clarity of vision about human motives and failings that gleams through all his best work, this is a book that offers a bitter warning even as it delivers immense reading pleasure.”
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