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The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
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Our Price: $9.85
You Save: $ 1.10 ( 10% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Average Customer Rating:
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The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780192836298
ISBN: 0192836293
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 352
Publication Date: 1999-07-22
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780192836298
ISBN: 0192836293
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 352
Publication Date: 1999-07-22
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
Editorial Review of The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)
Arranged in the order of their original publication and written during Kipling's time as a journalist in India, these seventeen short stories explore the themes of isolation and abandonment and the effects of the Indian caste system on society. Along with the title piece, the volume includes "Gemini," "A Wayside Comedy," "The Hill of Illusion," "Only a Subaltern," "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep," "Black Jack," and others.
Customer Reviews of The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: the man who would be dead
Review: "The man who would be king" is Kipling's great story of two British ex-soldiers who concoct a nutty scheme to personally conquer an obscure Asiatic province, set themselves up as kings and rob the place blind. They decide to target tribal areas somewhere in Afghanistan...and we know what that means...Gardens of War.
Our boys make it, and impressing the gullible and superstitious natives with their rifles and military knowhow, they manage to subjugate several tribal areas and consolidate them into one kingdom. Unfortunately, they didn't factor in religion and women. Well they did, in part. They had made an initial bargain...no women, not until they get back. Well, one of our boys gets a little too full of himself and thinks he can indulge himself with a woman. It is a terrible mistake.
Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Kipling's Masonic parable of the dangers of colonisation
Review: "The Man Who Would Be King" has not unreasonably been used to title many a compendium of Kipling's short stories, since it not only ranks as one of his best, but is also so well known because of the John Huston movie marvellously interpreted by Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Christopher Plummer.
The short novel first appeared in the "Phantom Rickshaw" in 1888 but was again collected in "Wee Willie Winkie and other stories" in 1895. Kipling for this work was inspired by the travels of Josiah Harlan, an American adventurer who claimed the title of Prince of Ghor in 1840 thanks to the military force he lead into Afghanistan (Read the instructive "The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan" by Ben McIntyre).
The story is built with a technique often utilized by Kipling of the picture and frame and is in itself a parable with many possible interpretations, as parables often are. A journalist of a local Indian paper meats a loafer on a train. The man, an ex-military asks him to contact a friend of his in a later date to tell him that he can't meet him presently. After a short time the two friends visit the journalist and tell him they intend to conquer an empire for themselves. Again after two years only one gets back and narrates the adventures the two have been through, that have ended with the death of one of them.
The frame of the story is Kipling's present day India with an established administrative empire and the journalist is evidently Kipling, the picture is Dravot and Carnehan's adventure in Kafiristan, the remote Afghan province they conquer for a brief period. The picture represents the early ages of the making of the British Empire that had relied on adventurers, dreamers and military men possessing superior technologies (arms) compared to the natives. The most evident moral of the parable is that once the English neglect their moral duty towards the native populations there is no sense in the permanence of the Empire and it is destined to fail, but many others can be hypothesized. Many critics have identified this story as a form of disillusionment of Kipling with the society he was living in at that time, while instead in his later life he was known to sustain British Imperialism.
One aspect that often goes unnoticed in this short story is the importance Kipling (a mason himself) gives to the underground tentacles of the secret Masonic network that consented the British influence in India and in European politics. If you happen to watch the John Huston film this is made very clear.
The novella is full of allusions, recalls, citations of different realities and it would take to long to analyse it in depth even though this effort will surely reward the reader. The "Man Who Would Be King" remains one of the milestones of the collective imaginary of our modern world where colonisation is far from forgotten.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Worst Ever Reader!
Review: We rushed out and bought this new version. I don't think it's a computer, but she's almost that bad! For a great unabridged read try the 1991 Dercum Audio edition read by William Barker who adapts the character voices adroitly, showing an uncanny ear for the British aristocrats. Although not the latest high tech I for one will stick to the best!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Great Book, Computer Reading It
Review: This is a great story, I highly recommend it. However, this recording is a digital voice reading it, so it completely takes away from the story. I love audiobooks, but this one was unlistenable. It was like having bonzibuddy read hamlet.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Perhaps a lesson for today's men-who-would-be-kings?
Review: Kipling's critics have long been regarded him as the "bard of imperialism," but the title is telling of his work. In many of his stories he has promoted the virtues of the Queen's empire and created marvelous tales about the adventures of explorers. However, in The Man Who Would be King, Kipling complicates his popular themes by implying a distinction between the cavalier, enterprising upstarts of early empire and the more entrenched, administrative empire that he personally knew.
The Man Who Would be King intersects the lives of the narrator (a stand-in for Kipling himself), the responsible and respectable journalist, with Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, two adventurous misfits. Through the narrator, Kipling expresses nostalgia toward the earlier days of the empire, represented by Dravot and Carnehan. However, this fondness is tempered by the view that the attitude of the early entrepreneur-imperialists was naïve to the realities and responsibilities of administering an empire, embodied in the narrator. This distinction is seen in the cautionary attitude that Kipling takes toward Dravot and Carnehan during their first encounters, the rapt attention that the narrator pays to Carnehan's recounting of his adventure, and the ultimately tragic ends which both Dravot and Carnehan meet.
Dravot and Carnehan are caricatures, to be sure, of the enterprising spirit that so many British in India came armed with, each in search of their personal fortune and adventure. In his first meeting with the narrator, Carnehan declares, "If India was filled with men like you and me, not knowing more than the crows where they'd get their next day's rations, it isn't seventy millions of revenue the land would be paying-it's seven hundred millions." Of course, this is a persuasive technique that Carnehan uses to build camaraderie with the narrator, and it appears to be somewhat successful. The narrator seems enchanted with the attitude of his companion, prefacing their encounter with "he was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself." Of course, we know that the narrator is a newspaperman who spends long nights laying type for the morning paper, not vagabonding around, however he inserts this to demonstrate a connection with this wanderer.
Following this encounter, the narrator is approached at his office by the two who hope to gain basic information to allow them to go "away to be Kings." However, the narrator is instantly concerned that they are hatching a foolish plan and exclaims, "You'll be cut to pieces before you're fifty miles across the border," and "You two are fools...You'll be turned back at the Frontier or cut up the minute you set foot in Afghanistan." He is unable to dissuade them from their journey and the next day sees them off at the local bazaar, still expressing concern: "`Have you got everything you want,' I asked, overcome with astonishment." He hears little else of the duo for the next three years, and assumes them to be lost causes in their journey.
Unexpectedly, though, the unrecognizably disfigured Carnehan interrupts and recounts his story for the rapt narrator at his desk one night three years later. Perhaps partly because of his disbelief and partly due to his fascination with adventure, the narrator listens, attentive to the final detail, to the tragic tale of Peachey and Dravot. At the end, Carnehan produced from his bag "the dried, withered head of Daniel Dravot!" and then "shambled out of the office." The narrator finds the tattered figure on the street, and shows his loyalty to his fallen brother by driving "him to the nearest missionary for eventual transfer to the Asylum."
The ending of the story is particularly filled with allusions to Kipling's feelings on the matter of the British Empire. The adventurous Dravot and Carnehan represented an anachronistic attitude of the Empire that, fortunately or unfortunately, did not belong in the Empire of Kipling's day. They attempted their adventure, and though they were successful for a short time, they ultimately failed in their endeavors. The narrator, as the modernized colonizer, knew that tragedy was their fate and saw it as his duty to warn his brothers, and in the end care for them. This interpretation does allow for the sympathy that the narrator demonstrates when meeting with Carnehan on the train and when absorbing the details of their journey.
A slightly different analysis of Kipling's attitude suggests that Kipling has become disillusioned with the Empire as a whole. This puts Dravot and Carnehan as the embodiment of all colonizers, not simply earlier ones, and the narrator as a wizened British subject who has learned from the mistakes of his past. He cautions and cares for his misguided brethren, and knows that they will meet tragic fates, but he is still captured by the nostalgia of past days of enterprise and adventure. He longs for those days, but has the benefit of hindsight to know the sad outcome of adventurous hubris. In this interpretation, the crowned head of Dravot represents the caution to the current crown of the fate they may face if they do not reverse their imperial ambitions.
In either analysis, Kipling's adventure tale appears to be a sober warning to any "would-be" kings, be they British or otherwise. Ironically, this tale may be rather timely to Americans in light of the current military involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kipling would likely, though sadly, be vindicated in the fact that history does repeat itself.
Review Summary: the man who would be dead
Review: "The man who would be king" is Kipling's great story of two British ex-soldiers who concoct a nutty scheme to personally conquer an obscure Asiatic province, set themselves up as kings and rob the place blind. They decide to target tribal areas somewhere in Afghanistan...and we know what that means...Gardens of War.
Our boys make it, and impressing the gullible and superstitious natives with their rifles and military knowhow, they manage to subjugate several tribal areas and consolidate them into one kingdom. Unfortunately, they didn't factor in religion and women. Well they did, in part. They had made an initial bargain...no women, not until they get back. Well, one of our boys gets a little too full of himself and thinks he can indulge himself with a woman. It is a terrible mistake.
Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Kipling's Masonic parable of the dangers of colonisation
Review: "The Man Who Would Be King" has not unreasonably been used to title many a compendium of Kipling's short stories, since it not only ranks as one of his best, but is also so well known because of the John Huston movie marvellously interpreted by Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Christopher Plummer.
The short novel first appeared in the "Phantom Rickshaw" in 1888 but was again collected in "Wee Willie Winkie and other stories" in 1895. Kipling for this work was inspired by the travels of Josiah Harlan, an American adventurer who claimed the title of Prince of Ghor in 1840 thanks to the military force he lead into Afghanistan (Read the instructive "The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan" by Ben McIntyre).
The story is built with a technique often utilized by Kipling of the picture and frame and is in itself a parable with many possible interpretations, as parables often are. A journalist of a local Indian paper meats a loafer on a train. The man, an ex-military asks him to contact a friend of his in a later date to tell him that he can't meet him presently. After a short time the two friends visit the journalist and tell him they intend to conquer an empire for themselves. Again after two years only one gets back and narrates the adventures the two have been through, that have ended with the death of one of them.
The frame of the story is Kipling's present day India with an established administrative empire and the journalist is evidently Kipling, the picture is Dravot and Carnehan's adventure in Kafiristan, the remote Afghan province they conquer for a brief period. The picture represents the early ages of the making of the British Empire that had relied on adventurers, dreamers and military men possessing superior technologies (arms) compared to the natives. The most evident moral of the parable is that once the English neglect their moral duty towards the native populations there is no sense in the permanence of the Empire and it is destined to fail, but many others can be hypothesized. Many critics have identified this story as a form of disillusionment of Kipling with the society he was living in at that time, while instead in his later life he was known to sustain British Imperialism.
One aspect that often goes unnoticed in this short story is the importance Kipling (a mason himself) gives to the underground tentacles of the secret Masonic network that consented the British influence in India and in European politics. If you happen to watch the John Huston film this is made very clear.
The novella is full of allusions, recalls, citations of different realities and it would take to long to analyse it in depth even though this effort will surely reward the reader. The "Man Who Would Be King" remains one of the milestones of the collective imaginary of our modern world where colonisation is far from forgotten.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Worst Ever Reader!
Review: We rushed out and bought this new version. I don't think it's a computer, but she's almost that bad! For a great unabridged read try the 1991 Dercum Audio edition read by William Barker who adapts the character voices adroitly, showing an uncanny ear for the British aristocrats. Although not the latest high tech I for one will stick to the best!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Great Book, Computer Reading It
Review: This is a great story, I highly recommend it. However, this recording is a digital voice reading it, so it completely takes away from the story. I love audiobooks, but this one was unlistenable. It was like having bonzibuddy read hamlet.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Perhaps a lesson for today's men-who-would-be-kings?
Review: Kipling's critics have long been regarded him as the "bard of imperialism," but the title is telling of his work. In many of his stories he has promoted the virtues of the Queen's empire and created marvelous tales about the adventures of explorers. However, in The Man Who Would be King, Kipling complicates his popular themes by implying a distinction between the cavalier, enterprising upstarts of early empire and the more entrenched, administrative empire that he personally knew.
The Man Who Would be King intersects the lives of the narrator (a stand-in for Kipling himself), the responsible and respectable journalist, with Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, two adventurous misfits. Through the narrator, Kipling expresses nostalgia toward the earlier days of the empire, represented by Dravot and Carnehan. However, this fondness is tempered by the view that the attitude of the early entrepreneur-imperialists was naïve to the realities and responsibilities of administering an empire, embodied in the narrator. This distinction is seen in the cautionary attitude that Kipling takes toward Dravot and Carnehan during their first encounters, the rapt attention that the narrator pays to Carnehan's recounting of his adventure, and the ultimately tragic ends which both Dravot and Carnehan meet.
Dravot and Carnehan are caricatures, to be sure, of the enterprising spirit that so many British in India came armed with, each in search of their personal fortune and adventure. In his first meeting with the narrator, Carnehan declares, "If India was filled with men like you and me, not knowing more than the crows where they'd get their next day's rations, it isn't seventy millions of revenue the land would be paying-it's seven hundred millions." Of course, this is a persuasive technique that Carnehan uses to build camaraderie with the narrator, and it appears to be somewhat successful. The narrator seems enchanted with the attitude of his companion, prefacing their encounter with "he was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself." Of course, we know that the narrator is a newspaperman who spends long nights laying type for the morning paper, not vagabonding around, however he inserts this to demonstrate a connection with this wanderer.
Following this encounter, the narrator is approached at his office by the two who hope to gain basic information to allow them to go "away to be Kings." However, the narrator is instantly concerned that they are hatching a foolish plan and exclaims, "You'll be cut to pieces before you're fifty miles across the border," and "You two are fools...You'll be turned back at the Frontier or cut up the minute you set foot in Afghanistan." He is unable to dissuade them from their journey and the next day sees them off at the local bazaar, still expressing concern: "`Have you got everything you want,' I asked, overcome with astonishment." He hears little else of the duo for the next three years, and assumes them to be lost causes in their journey.
Unexpectedly, though, the unrecognizably disfigured Carnehan interrupts and recounts his story for the rapt narrator at his desk one night three years later. Perhaps partly because of his disbelief and partly due to his fascination with adventure, the narrator listens, attentive to the final detail, to the tragic tale of Peachey and Dravot. At the end, Carnehan produced from his bag "the dried, withered head of Daniel Dravot!" and then "shambled out of the office." The narrator finds the tattered figure on the street, and shows his loyalty to his fallen brother by driving "him to the nearest missionary for eventual transfer to the Asylum."
The ending of the story is particularly filled with allusions to Kipling's feelings on the matter of the British Empire. The adventurous Dravot and Carnehan represented an anachronistic attitude of the Empire that, fortunately or unfortunately, did not belong in the Empire of Kipling's day. They attempted their adventure, and though they were successful for a short time, they ultimately failed in their endeavors. The narrator, as the modernized colonizer, knew that tragedy was their fate and saw it as his duty to warn his brothers, and in the end care for them. This interpretation does allow for the sympathy that the narrator demonstrates when meeting with Carnehan on the train and when absorbing the details of their journey.
A slightly different analysis of Kipling's attitude suggests that Kipling has become disillusioned with the Empire as a whole. This puts Dravot and Carnehan as the embodiment of all colonizers, not simply earlier ones, and the narrator as a wizened British subject who has learned from the mistakes of his past. He cautions and cares for his misguided brethren, and knows that they will meet tragic fates, but he is still captured by the nostalgia of past days of enterprise and adventure. He longs for those days, but has the benefit of hindsight to know the sad outcome of adventurous hubris. In this interpretation, the crowned head of Dravot represents the caution to the current crown of the fate they may face if they do not reverse their imperial ambitions.
In either analysis, Kipling's adventure tale appears to be a sober warning to any "would-be" kings, be they British or otherwise. Ironically, this tale may be rather timely to Americans in light of the current military involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kipling would likely, though sadly, be vindicated in the fact that history does repeat itself.