Kipling

The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, by David Gilmour. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 368 pages. $26. Kipling the poet and Kipling the man with the scarring childhood occupy books elsewhere. David Gilmour is interested in Kipling the imperialist, the poet laureate of Empire, who turns out to be more complex than the blatting jingoist of popular repute. This does not mean that Rudyard Kipling turns out to have been a wooly lamb. He believed that Britain had a right -- and a duty -- to rule lesser peoples, and he was sure which peoples were lesser.

Jungle plants extend off the stage, reaching toward the audience. An African drum beat sounds, and a story of the beginning of the world begins, "My Best Beloved." Armed with creativity and charm, Glenelg Country School last week pulled the audience into the magical African world of Just So. Based on Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories," the performance combines Kipling's stories in one musical. In the beginning of the world, the Eldest Magician created all the animals, only to realize that they are all the same.

What's the coolest death in "Rudyard Kipling's 'Jungle Book' "? Hmm, this is a hard choice.Is it . . . the coward who gets chewed to death by the tiger?Or is it . . . the guy who gets sucked down slowly, every so slowly, into quicksand?Or maybe . . . the native traitor trapped in a tomb that compresses darkly over him, promising slow extinction by suffocation?Or, no, no, it's the British officer laden with loot who sinks to the bottom of a pool and looks around in oxygen-starved despair at the skulls of other unfortunate souls, until a giant serpent bites him in the face!

Time's Eye, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Del Rey. 337 pages. $26.95 including CD-ROM. Here's the publishing equivalent of a Spielberg movie opening -- not just a terrific new science-fiction novel by two of the greatest living practitioners of the genre (the reigning genius of the form and long-time resident of Sri Lanka, and a former British engineer turned award-winning novelist) but also an artifact of our times. Along with a novel about a major collision of time and space comes a CD-ROM that includes an interview with the two writers and Adobe eBook editions of Baxter's novels Manifold: Time and Evolution.

Insider transactions of 1,000 shares or more for public companies based in Maryland or with operations here. Ryland Group Inc. Kipling W. Scott, officer, exercised an option for 10,000 shares of common at $23.50 each Jan. 29 and sold 10,000 shares at $77.11 each Jan. 29 and now directly and indirectly holds 4,769. Ned Mansour, director, exercised an option for 5,000 shares of common at $40.75 each Jan. 30 and sold 5,000 shares at $79.20 each Jan. 30 and now directly and indirectly holds 1,999.

HOLLYWOOD -- The success of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" has not been lost on British mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh. The man who made millions off such stage blockbusters as "Cats," "Les Miserables" and "The Phantom of the Opera" is talking with Steven Spielberg about an animated version of Rudyard Kipling's classic "Just So Stories."Mr. Mackintosh had mounted two small productions in England of "Just So," a musical based on the Kipling book, and somebody in the audience alerted Mr. Spielberg to the project.

Pamela Jekel has made a name for herself charting new territory.From the little-known world of a woman pirate captain to the waters and lore of the Columbia River, she has looked at the past from a fresh perspective in her historical novels.But being a scholar of the English language and its literature, Ms. Jekel, a Dayton resident, needed to go beyond retracing the footsteps of settlers through backwoods and backwaters.In body, her journey took her to the jungles of India. In mind, it put her in touch with one of the best-known storytellers in the mother tongue.

Gwynne L. Holden -- a Harford County attorney and dairy farmer who nurtured a lifetime love for the poetry of Rudyard Kipling -- died of lung cancer Wednesday at Fallston General Hospital. He was 82.He served as an assistant state's attorney for Harford County from the mid-1970s until 1978 and was past president of the Harford County Bar Association."Dad was proudest of being a defense attorney," said S. Todd Holden, his son. "His father was a carpenter, and his mother was a phone operator.

Jungle plants extend off the stage, reaching toward the audience. An African drum beat sounds, and a story of the beginning of the world begins, "My Best Beloved." Armed with creativity and charm, Glenelg Country School last week pulled the audience into the magical African world of Just So. Based on Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories," the performance combines Kipling's stories in one musical. In the beginning of the world, the Eldest Magician created all the animals, only to realize that they are all the same.

Services for Dr. Eliot Wesley Johnson, a general practitioner at St. Agnes Hospital for more than 50 years, will be at 11 a.m. tomorrow at the Loudon Park Cemetery in Southwest Baltimore.Dr. Johnson, a longtime resident of Catonsville, died Friday at St. Agnes after a heart attack. He was 90.He retired in 1979, after a career that included general medicine and obstetric practices in Irvington and Catonsville, and staff service at Bon Secours Hospital.His most celebrated patient was a child who recovered from leukemia in 1952, in a cure attributed by the Roman Catholic Church to the intercession of Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, who achieved sainthood in the church because of that and two other miracles.

Edmund Wilson died 30 years ago this summer, but his shade lingers over those who write. Some weeks ago, after reviewing a book on Rudyard Kipling's political attitudes for these pages, I picked up Wilson's The Wound and the Bow to read his essay on Kipling. In "The Kipling That Nobody Read," written more than 60 years ago, Wilson hit the big points: the miserable childhood, the ear for vernacular, the technical mastery, the hatred, the subordination of literary gifts to hidebound political views.

The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, by David Gilmour. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 368 pages. $26. Kipling the poet and Kipling the man with the scarring childhood occupy books elsewhere. David Gilmour is interested in Kipling the imperialist, the poet laureate of Empire, who turns out to be more complex than the blatting jingoist of popular repute. This does not mean that Rudyard Kipling turns out to have been a wooly lamb. He believed that Britain had a right -- and a duty -- to rule lesser peoples, and he was sure which peoples were lesser.

Insider transactions of 1,000 shares or more for public companies based in Maryland or with operations here. Ryland Group Inc. Kipling W. Scott, officer, exercised an option for 10,000 shares of common at $23.50 each Jan. 29 and sold 10,000 shares at $77.11 each Jan. 29 and now directly and indirectly holds 4,769. Ned Mansour, director, exercised an option for 5,000 shares of common at $40.75 each Jan. 30 and sold 5,000 shares at $79.20 each Jan. 30 and now directly and indirectly holds 1,999.

I have always loved anthologies. As a kid, I had a dozen or more, which I went back to again and again. Mostly prose, but plenty of poetry -- Lewis Carroll, most certainly, Keats, a good deal of Kipling -- hardly respectable these days (though, well, perhaps terrorism will yield a revival). I have some of them still, though sadly not all. I still pull them down, as I do books I have read long since. I read a few pages, mostly familiar ones. I cannot imagine a life without that companionship, books' magical power to ignite and sustain the heart and mind.

"Time to Hunt," Stephen Hunter. Doubleday. 467 pages. $23.95.For years, Bob Lee Swagger drank to forget his days in "The Land of Bad Things," as he calls Vietnam, the land where he earned a fearsome name for his skill as a sniper, "Bob the Nailer." In "Time to Hunt," Swagger drinks to remember, to remember especially his jungle confrontation with a dreaded rival, "the white sniper," who killed his friend, and put a bullet in Swagger's hip, where it lies lodged, a bad memory.A generation later, in the Idaho fastness where Swagger has fled to forget, the white sniper comes hunting for him and his family.

What's the coolest death in "Rudyard Kipling's 'Jungle Book' "? Hmm, this is a hard choice.Is it . . . the coward who gets chewed to death by the tiger?Or is it . . . the guy who gets sucked down slowly, every so slowly, into quicksand?Or maybe . . . the native traitor trapped in a tomb that compresses darkly over him, promising slow extinction by suffocation?Or, no, no, it's the British officer laden with loot who sinks to the bottom of a pool and looks around in oxygen-starved despair at the skulls of other unfortunate souls, until a giant serpent bites him in the face!

Edmund Wilson died 30 years ago this summer, but his shade lingers over those who write. Some weeks ago, after reviewing a book on Rudyard Kipling's political attitudes for these pages, I picked up Wilson's The Wound and the Bow to read his essay on Kipling. In "The Kipling That Nobody Read," written more than 60 years ago, Wilson hit the big points: the miserable childhood, the ear for vernacular, the technical mastery, the hatred, the subordination of literary gifts to hidebound political views.

I have always loved anthologies. As a kid, I had a dozen or more, which I went back to again and again. Mostly prose, but plenty of poetry -- Lewis Carroll, most certainly, Keats, a good deal of Kipling -- hardly respectable these days (though, well, perhaps terrorism will yield a revival). I have some of them still, though sadly not all. I still pull them down, as I do books I have read long since. I read a few pages, mostly familiar ones. I cannot imagine a life without that companionship, books' magical power to ignite and sustain the heart and mind.

Gwynne L. Holden -- a Harford County attorney and dairy farmer who nurtured a lifetime love for the poetry of Rudyard Kipling -- died of lung cancer Wednesday at Fallston General Hospital. He was 82.He served as an assistant state's attorney for Harford County from the mid-1970s until 1978 and was past president of the Harford County Bar Association."Dad was proudest of being a defense attorney," said S. Todd Holden, his son. "His father was a carpenter, and his mother was a phone operator.

Pamela Jekel has made a name for herself charting new territory.From the little-known world of a woman pirate captain to the waters and lore of the Columbia River, she has looked at the past from a fresh perspective in her historical novels.But being a scholar of the English language and its literature, Ms. Jekel, a Dayton resident, needed to go beyond retracing the footsteps of settlers through backwoods and backwaters.In body, her journey took her to the jungles of India. In mind, it put her in touch with one of the best-known storytellers in the mother tongue.