Book Reviews: Book Review of Stuart: A Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters -- Blue Rectangle

FAQ



del.icio.us	Reddit	Digg It!	Email to friend
SELL US YOUR BOOKS To sell books or sell textbooks to us, enter your ISBN numbers here, one book per line. Please include all 10 or 13 digits. Enter as many books as you like: EXAMPLE: 1864502800 1741040914 978-0195174625 ENTER ISBNs THEN CLICK HERE

Stuart: A Life Backwards

Alexander Masters

Buy this book
from Amazon

More from this reviewer

See other book reviews:
Non-Fiction
All Book Reviews

“The book is about two men. It's focused on Stuart, who is a homeless chaotic man living in England, in Cambridge, England and it's really the story of his life. But it's also the story of the writer himself, Alexander Masters, who becomes friends with Stuart and gets involved in his life to the extent that he essentially gets to know him extremely well. And so we get a lot of information about Masters. Not necessarily his life history, but his perspective on - his changing perspective on the issue of homelessness in England. Well, the narrative structure of this book is fantastic. It's so unique because - the subtitle of the book is A Life Backwards and essentially that's what Masters does. He introduces us to Stuart at the end of his life. And then he uses the book to go backwards and eventually we end up at the beginning of Stuart's life. In addition to going backwards through his life, there's actually two narratives. There's a narrative of Masters and Stuart themselves forming a friendship and particularly through this joint effort to help get a couple of people that they know released from prison who run a homeless shelter. And so you've got that narrative moving forward and then interspersed in that are chapters that go backwards in Stuart's life. It's important to understand that this guy is a mess. I mean he has basically for 20 years been drug addicted and alcoholic and living on the streets. And the book itself becomes a mystery in that we find out how he got this way. It is written in British style English so the language is a little bit harder to get used to. The book is really a commentary on homelessness and it's a commentary on the social system that deals with homelessness. This is a four out of five star book for me.”