We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia).

Imaginative, piercing portrayal of a man shadowed by merciless demons. When Stuart is killed by a train (accident rather than suicide, it seems), Masters knows that the Truth he has been pursuing will forever elude him. His research included studying books about homelessness and the psychology (or pathology) of the abused, examining court and school records and reading articles. Masters also keeps us apprised of what’s going on at the moment and offers a running commentary on the progress of his writing-a sort of meta-biography. He begins in the present and ends with Stuart’s very obscure early childhood. The author does work backwards, sort of, in this final version. Masters claims he was never afraid of Stuart, with whom he shared quarters and close contact.

Sexually abused by a brother and babysitter, addicted to glue-sniffing as a teen (and, later, to just about every other substance), a continual runaway, a habitual jailbird, a sometimes violent denizen of the streets, a common and an uncommon criminal, he was somehow likable as well. “In biography, most of the time, the real person is a nuisance,” Masters sighs. One of the charms of this book is that Stuart comments occasionally about the current draft, offering suggestions, sniffing derisively or dismissively about the text. When Masters finished a first draft, he showed it to Stuart, who said it was boring and should be organized more like a thriller or detective novel that worked backwards through events until the discovery of the Truth. The first-time author worked on Stuart Shorter’s story for several years, experiencing the frustrations and occasional joys of a close association with someone caught in chaos. British homeless advocate Masters crafts an unconventional biography of a man who raged not only at the dying of the light but often at the very light itself.

Stuart a life backwards book