SOURCE: A review of Life Work, in Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 15, No. 4, July–August, 1995, p. 29.

In the following review, Thorpe offers a mixed assessment of Life Work, faulting the work for indulging in too much “name-dropping.”

There are plenty of definitions of work, including the cynical one by Bertrand Russell—that it's merely moving matter from one location to another. Additional words—or ideas—for work include labor, toil and moil, struggle, swink (archaic), drudge, grub, plod, exert, strain, and goodness knows how many others.

This memoir by Donald Hall [Life Work] seeks to put the concept of work into a context of the literary and intellectual life, yet not lose sight of the word's basic denotations of laboring or “swinking.” In the full sense of the term, work is as spiritual as it is physical. The idea that “labour” is somehow spiritual too is not new—it goes...