Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, Katherine Bucknell
Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, Katherine Bucknell
List: $34.99 | Sale: $24.50
Club: $17.49

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

Author: Katherine Bucknell

Narrator: Katherine Bucknell

Unabridged: 42 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/28/2025


Synopsis

The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.

Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. When Hitler took power, he fled with his German boyfriend, who was pursued and arrested by the Gestapo. Isherwood left Europe and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita.

Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ryan on June 04, 2024

Any account of Isherwood’s life lives and dies by how the writer handles two things: the life before Berlin, and the life after. For Berlin made Isherwood. It gave him his two most memorable characters - Arthur Norris and Sally Bowles - and established the clear, compelling style that stays coolly n......more

Goodreads review by Lesley on May 26, 2024

I admit I was drawn to this title simply because I have always loved the film “Cabaret” based on Isherwood’s stories set in pre WW2 Berlin. This is a comprehensive and fascinating work detailing a life that began in privilege and where societal expectations were rigid and confined. But in a changing......more

Goodreads review by Richard on December 20, 2024

In 2016, I read all of Christopher Isherwood’s oeuvre. Why? I admired his work at every level: sophisticated and lyrical vocabulary; his sometimes quirky but lyrical syntax, the variety of genres he tackled, from fiction to nonfiction (history, biography), and play/screenplay writing. My reading inc......more

Goodreads review by Angela on August 26, 2024

Dense and fascinating biography of Christopher Isherwood. Gives much contextual information about his time spent in England, the USA, and of course, Berlin where Berlin Stories was inspired. I have always known of Christopher Isherwood, because of Cabaret. The writer, Katherine Bucknell, certainly di......more

Goodreads review by Vivek on November 30, 2024

I have long admired the works of Isherwood, so when I got to know that there was a chunky biography published on him, I had to read it. Katherine Bucknell, the director of his foundation, has created a fitting tribute with her biography, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, a detailed, richly researche......more