Kim

Kipling, Rudyard

ISBN 10: 0895773430 / ISBN 13: 9780895773432

Published by The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., Pleasantville NY, 1990

About this Item

303 Pages. Action-adventure novel of Kim in India. Cream boards with emerald green gilded leatherette quarter-spine. Cover has green gold decoration of Elephant with Kim astride. Light green endpaper. A laid in four page Reader's Digest brochure in the same color as the endpapers that includes biography and interesting Kipling trivia along with a portrait and his printed signature. Decorative chapter caps. Afterword by John L. Cobbs. By the turn of the century, there was hardly a reader in the English-speaking world who had not been enchanted by Kipling's stories and poems. No contemporary author was so widely read or so frequently discussed. Every honor flowed to him, including the Nobel Prize in literature, whch he was the first Englishman to receive. Kipling was born inn Bombay in 1865, the only son of adoring parents who had gone to the East to serve the British Empire. Little Ruddy spoke Hindi before he mastered English, and used to to boss the indulgent household staff in proper sahib style. The story - Fraternizing with a horse trader who doubles as an agent of Her Majhesty's Secret Serivce, helping a Tibetan lama search for a lost river, touring a mystical, magical land that is the shining jewel in the British crown. Pretty exoctic stuff for most of us, but all in a day's work for Kimball O'Hara, the sly, adventurous waif known to all as Kim. The complete full text as first published in 1901. Attractive beautifully illustrated book typical of the high quality we have come to expect from Reader's Digest.

Seller Inventory # 7852

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Kim
• Publisher: The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., Pleasantville NY
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0895773430
• ISBN 13: 9780895773432
• Binding: Hard Back
• Illustrator: Aagaard, Gary
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Dust Jacket As Published

About this title

Synopsis

HARDCOVER TALL OCTAVO

Review

One of the particular pleasures of reading Kim is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience that Rudyard Kipling gives his complex hero. Kim O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India, is neither innocent nor victimized. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally dissolute father's death, the boy has grown up in the streets of Lahore:

Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white--a poor white of the very poorest.

From his father and the woman who raised him, Kim has come to believe that a great destiny awaits him. The details, however, are a bit fuzzy, consisting as they do of the woman's addled prophecies of "'a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and'--dropping into English--'nine hundred devils.'"

In the meantime, Kim amuses himself with intrigues, executing "commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion." His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his "love of the game for its own sake," makes him uniquely suited for a bigger game. And when, at last, the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain's struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India. Kipling was, first and foremost, a man of his time; born and raised in India in the 19th century, he was a fervid supporter of the Raj. Nevertheless, his portrait of India and its people is remarkably sympathetic. Yes, there is the stereotypical Westernized Indian Babu Huree Chander with his atrocious English, but there is also Kim's friend and mentor, the Afghani horse trader Mahub Ali, and the gentle Tibetan lama with whom Kim travels along the Grand Trunk Road. The humanity of his characters consistently belies Kipling's private prejudices, and raises Kim above the mere ripping good yarn to the level of a timeless classic. --Alix Wilber