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Against the Wind: An Autobiography
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In this fascinating and uniquely colorful autobiography, a twentieth-century master of suspense fiction candidly examines his extraordinary life, times, and art
One of the twentieth century’s most respected writers of adventure and espionage thrillers, Geoffrey Household penned more than twenty novels and short story collections in a career that spanned more than fifty yea
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One of the twentieth century’s most respected writers of adventure and espionage thrillers, Geoffrey Household penned more than twenty novels and short story collections in a career that spanned more than fifty yea
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Kindle Edition, 184 pages
Published
March 24th 2015
by Open Road Media
(first published 1958)
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Oct 12, 2011
Jessica
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Household is a charming narrator. I wouldn't rate this as highly as the best of his novels (of which I've only read the terrific Rogue Male so far), but he's had an unusual life and is atypically British: that is, very open to other ways of life, a lover of Spain and the Spanish, a linguist. The sections are titled: Traveller, Soldier, Craftsman. Soldier, the middle section, is the longest and least interesting (to me). I admit I skipped some of it. But...there are adventures and observations fo
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Author of many thrillers and adventure novels, Geoffrey Household’s own life was as full of thrills and adventures as that of any of his heroes. A peripatetic life, first in business and commerce, later in the military during WWII, his trajectory was anything but ordinary. He even managed to fit in a couple of marriages and a couple of children – not that he gives them any prominence in this autobiography. A fascinating life, certainly, but this account of it is very dry and on occasion even ted
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A somewhat dense and evasive book about Household's very interesting life. It has some of the hallmarks of him at his best -- wit, actually-interesting descriptions of logistics (such as troop movements) -- and some of what I don't like. It's not a must-read on its own, EXCEPT if you also like Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy. It turns out that Household was based in Bucharest and Cairo at about the same time as the Mannings, just as World War II broke out, and moved in the same English-expat wor
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British author of mostly thrillers, though among 37 books he also published children's fiction. Household's flight-and-chase novels, which show the influence of John Buchan, were often narrated in the first person by a gentleman-adventurer. Among his best-know works is' Rogue Male' (1939), a suggestive story of a hunter who becomes the hunted, in 1941 filmed by Fritz Lang as 'Man Hunt'. Household'
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“Taken aback by the discovery, a little too late, that tropical rain has the volume of a bathroom shower, I splashed on to a train for Panama City, put up at the Hotel Europa and restored equanimity with Planter’s Punch. A world in which so delectable a drink existed, as well as the thirst necessary to deal with two successive pints of it, could not be wholly bad. In the evening I set out to inspect North American civilisation.”
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“The full essence of Americanism in the Canal Zone is too overwhelming a contrast to the Spanish-American city. And that is a violent way to taste a new country. You might as well get your first impression of the British from the Gezireh Club in Cairo. Clean, self-consciously bright, admirably ordered for the consumption of ice-cream in friendly surroundings—that was my melancholy impression. The result to this day is that when I think of the United States, its aspect as a respectable middle-class holiday camp dominates all others. And that is unfair. If I had entered by New York, I should have found the stronger living and coarser laughter to which I was accustomed translated across the Atlantic into a city of exquisite beauty, with green and peaceful farming country easily to be reached at need. But there it is. My emotions insist that every American lives in a well-ordered suburb, whereas statistics, let alone observation, prove he does nothing of the sort. I am closer, perhaps, to a spiritual truth—for it is undeniable that the nearer any foreign community approaches the ideal of a garden city run by a council of advertising managers, the more Americans are at home in it.”
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