Life in the Jungle

"Michael Heseltine has enjoyed one of the most colourful and creative careers of modern British politics. By bestowing two successive nicknames - first 'Tarzan' and then 'Hezza' - the public displayed its instinctive rapport with him. For thirty years, from his days as Minister of Aerospace in the early 1970s to his appointments as Deputy Prime Minister in the mid-1990s, he has consistently ranked as one of the best-known and most admired of public figures." "In this autobiography he tells the story not just of his political life but of his business career as well - of his earliest commercial days running first a boarding-house and then a hotel in Bayswater; of how in 1962, as a property developer, he was almost forced into bankruptcy; of the way, after a disastrous start, he patiently built up his magazine empire to the point where it is today, one of the largest private companies in the land." "The book offers a number of personal glimpses. He tells of how he nearly died of meningitis at the age of five, of his sensitivity to his relative failure at his public school, of his feeling of vindication in being elected President of the Oxford Union in 1954 and of the subsequent ordeal of being trained as a national serviceman with the Brigade Squad at Caterham. He also writes movingly of his pride and joy, the arboretum at his country estate in Oxfordshire that he began planting twenty years ago."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.