Difference between revisions of "Newest Autobiography Reviews"
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| + | |author=Rick Stein | ||
| + | |title=Under a Mackerel Sky | ||
| + | |rating=4 | ||
| + | |genre=Autobiography | ||
| + | |summary=Rick Stein was born if not to wealth then certainly to privilege. He was raised on an Oxfordshire farm and spent holidays at the family's home in Cornwall. His parents were gregarious and intelligent and he was one of five children who led the sort of open-air life that country children did in those days before we worried about stranger danger. He enjoyed school and loved Cornwall, where he gained a reputation as he got older for giving riotous parties in a barn on the Cornish property. It was idyllic - until the day that his father (who was bi-polar) committed suicide. Stein's reaction to this was to head to the Australian outback where he worked in a variety of jobs (some more palatable than others) and finally came back to England, via America and Mexico. | ||
| + | |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091949912</amazonuk> | ||
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|title=Me After You | |title=Me After You | ||
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|summary=Now aged 80, Penelope Lively, the Booker Prize-winning author of twenty works of fiction including ''Moon Tiger'' (1987) and ''How It All Began'' (2011), is increasingly conscious of death approaching. It may be true that, as concluded in [[Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes]], 'we cannot truly savour life without a regular awareness of extinction', but this memoir is less a ''memento mori'' than an agreeably scattered tour through Lively's life and times. | |summary=Now aged 80, Penelope Lively, the Booker Prize-winning author of twenty works of fiction including ''Moon Tiger'' (1987) and ''How It All Began'' (2011), is increasingly conscious of death approaching. It may be true that, as concluded in [[Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes]], 'we cannot truly savour life without a regular awareness of extinction', but this memoir is less a ''memento mori'' than an agreeably scattered tour through Lively's life and times. | ||
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241146380</amazonuk> | |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241146380</amazonuk> | ||
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Revision as of 15:06, 31 August 2014
Under a Mackerel Sky by Rick Stein
Rick Stein was born if not to wealth then certainly to privilege. He was raised on an Oxfordshire farm and spent holidays at the family's home in Cornwall. His parents were gregarious and intelligent and he was one of five children who led the sort of open-air life that country children did in those days before we worried about stranger danger. He enjoyed school and loved Cornwall, where he gained a reputation as he got older for giving riotous parties in a barn on the Cornish property. It was idyllic - until the day that his father (who was bi-polar) committed suicide. Stein's reaction to this was to head to the Australian outback where he worked in a variety of jobs (some more palatable than others) and finally came back to England, via America and Mexico. Full review...
Me After You by Lucie Brownlee
People die all the time. I’m not trying to be crude, they just do. It’s the circle of life, or some less Disney-fied sentiment. And if everyone whose partner or parent died wrote a book about it, well, to say that would be less than good would be a severe understatement. For a book on such a theme to be worth reading, it has to have a pull, a twist, something to make you look twice. In Lucie’s case it’s the fact that her husband Mark was only 37 years old when he died. And not only that, he died during a bit of nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Talk about going out with a bang. Full review...
My Gentle Barn: where animals heal and children learn to hope by Ellie Laks
As a child Ellie Laks was abused, but not only did she suffer at the hands of her abuser, she also had to endure parental indifference to what was happening to her. Her only relief came through animals - and even then she had to cope when the animals were taken from her. As an adult she discovered that she had a real talent for healing animals - and that they helped her to heal too. In a brilliant leap of intuition she realised that if the animals could help her to heal they could do the same for others and so the Gentle Barn was born - a place where animals were brought as a place of safety and where disadvantaged children and special needs groups could use as therapy. Full review...
Any Other Mouth by Anneliese Mackintosh
With a title like Any Other Mouth, you know from the outset that this is, shall we say, a rather niche book. It’s not all about orifices, though. Partially autobiographical, this is the messy, ludicrous, wildly entertaining story of a girl who’s just a little bit different. Ok, make that a lot different. Full review...
My Outdoor Life by Ray Mears
Sometimes, a seemingly insignificant incident in one's youth can have far-reaching and profound consequences. Life is punctuated with pivotal moments that can completely alter a course of events. Ray Mears recalls such an incident when aged six, he opened an encyclopaedia and saw a picture of cavemen for the first time. A few months later, the same volume was sitting on the edge his desk, when suddenly, it started to slide. Mears reached out to grab it... Full review...
My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff
Joanna Rakoff was twenty three when she took a job as assistant to a literary agent in New York. She'd not long left graduate school (and her 'college boyfriend') and her dream was to become a poet. The job was for experience and for income - her parents were somewhat dismissive of the position, pointing out that it was what used to be called a secretary - but there was a bonus which Rakoff had not anticipated, or even appreciated when she first heard of it. The agency might be stuck in the past - with Dictaphones and typewriters rather than computers - but its main client was J D Salinger. Rakoff knew the name - obviously - but she had never read one of his books. Full review...
Home Sweet Anywhere: How We Sold Our House, Created a New Life, and Saw the World by Lynne Martin
Lynne and Tim Martin had known each other decades ago but when we meet them they've only been married for a short time. There's just one thing though - they're not ready to settle down, despite the fact that they're what might be called 'upper middle aged'. Their roots are in the US - both have adult children there and the Martins have a house in California - but they want to travel and not just as tourists. They want to see the world as the locals see it and to experience what it's like to live there. Lynne describes them as not being wealthy, but they decide to sell their home, invest the money and become 'home-free'. Full review...
Sad Men: A Memoir by Dave Roberts
Before he was twenty Dave Roberts had had a lot of jobs - far too many to list - but he really wanted to work in advertising and specifically for Saatchi and Saatchi, whom he saw as the best advertising agency and given their predominance in the early years of the eighties it's hard to argue with his judgement. The only problem was that jobs with the agency were hard to come by and Dave eventually accepted that he would have to start rather lower down the ladder with the intention of working his way up to the top. And that rung at the bottom of the ladder was a job with an agency in Leeds. Full review...
A Woman's Story by Annie Ernaux
After spending two years in an old people's home, Annie Ernaux's mother finally succumbs to Alzheimer's Disease. It has been a terrifyingly protracted end, and one that has spawned feelings of absolute helplessness in her daughter, who watched as her mother's life crumbled before an 'imagination' that bore 'no relation to reality'. Yet Ernaux's distress is also fuelled by the realisation that she'll 'never hear the sound of her [mother's] voice again', and by the fact that the fraying bond between the present and the past has finally been 'severed'. Impulsively, Ernaux decides to recreate that past, hoping to 'bring her [mother back] into the world' through a piece of writing. In short, she is 'incapable of doing anything else'. Full review...
Call the Vet: Farmers, Dramas and Disasters - My First Year as a Country Vet by Anna Birch
Newly-qualified vet Anna arrives in the sleepy coastal village of Ebbourne filled with dreams of following in the footsteps of her hero, James Herriot as she starts her new role working in a rural mixed practice. She will be treating farm animals, as well as smaller pets, in a friendly community in a stunning location. However, Anna barely has time to settle in before being thrown headlong into the thick of things with two tricky calvings to deal with and plenty of muck, blood and gore. “Oh yes Mum, it’s a glamorous job...” she laments. Full review...
Slow Getting Up by Nate Jackson
Sporting autobiographies are often written by those sports men and women who made it to the very pinnacle of their profession. Their stories surround past glories and how they lifted themselves up above the great to become the very best. However, for every superstar footballer or tennis player, there needs to be a lot more average Joes and Joettes for them to shine against. And who is to say that being an average player in a professional league is not an achievement in itself? Nate Jackson was one such ‘average’ player in the NFL – but would you call him that to his face? Full review...
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
If you read a broadsheet you will know the format of this book from when it came out in hardback – indeed I recognised a great portion of the third part as having been excerpted somewhere. Part one of this triptych is a look back at pioneering aeronauts in hot air balloons – either hydrogen balloons or flame balloons, whatever they are. They may have had crash landings, they may have suffered problems here and there and risked life and limb, but they travelled, they saw the world from unique angles, and almost in homage to Barnes' characters chasing the sun in an airplane in his own book, saw themselves as a photographic negative writ large in shadow form on the tops of clouds. Full review...
To Bed On Thursdays by Jenny Selby-Green
The advert asked for a young man, but seventeen year old Jenny Selby-Green applied anyway. She met all the other attributes, and the alternative would be having to take whatever job she was offered via the Labour Exchange, seeing as she’d already rejected the maximum of two offers under the 1950s Direction of Labour. And so, she became a journalist, or journalist of sorts anyway. Full review...
A Little Piece of England: A tale of self-sufficiency by John Jackson
Here at Bookbag we're great fans of John Jackson. We loved his Tales for Great Grandchildren and Brahma Dreaming: Legends from Hindu Mythology so it was something of a treat to meet the author on his own ground, so to speak. Originally published as A Bucket of Nuts and a Herring Net: The Birth of a Spare-Time Farm this is actually Jackson's first book and thirty-five years later we're delighted that it's been republished in hardback complete with the original black-and-white illustrations by Val Biro. Full review...
My Life In Agony by Irma Kurtz
I used to love the problem pages of magazines as a teenager. My friends and I would pour over the letters which invariable ended with some form of the question Am I normal? and mock the invariable Agony Aunt answer of Of course you’re normal, hooting instead No, you’re, really, REALLY not! That response perhaps illustrates why none of us decided to follow that as a career plan, but Irma Kurtz did, and as agony aunt for Cosmopolitan for more than 40 years it’s safe to say she has been a fair bit more sympathetic than we ever were. Full review...
Never Mind the Bullocks: One girl's 10,000 km adventure around India in the worlds cheapest car by Vanessa Able
With a cute little map of India on the front cover and cartoon cars puttering over the page, I thought I’d chosen an entertaining yet mind-broadening travelogue. Well I was wrong. Now I’ve read it through, I don’t even see it on the same shelf as a Lonely Planet. But that’s possibly this book’s novelty and great strength. The travelogue shelf is fair groaning under weighty tomes by Europeans digging into Indian life and culture. So let me unpack the delights of this particular book for you, but don’t be misled: you aren’t going to pick up many recommendations for your own odyssey from this round-India skedaddle. Full review...
Here and Now: Letters by J M Coetzee and Paul Auster
Reading letters by writers affords a particular pleasure. They give us access to the functioning of a writer’s mind when it’s somewhere between work and rest. Sometimes they reveal secrets, offer startling revelations about their writers and insights about the times they lived in. Here and Now, an exchange of letters between J M Coetzee and Paul Auster between 2008 and 2011, describes itself as ‘an epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends.’ Full review...
How to Disappear Completely: on modern anorexia by Kelsey Osgood
To the awkward 14 year-old Kelsey, a happy family and a comfortable suburban life are dull and numbing. A self-professed bookworm and fan of the literary greats, she craves meaning and purpose in an utterly normal teenage existence. Full review...
Sorcerers and Orange Peel by Ian Mathie
I can’t understand why Ian Mathie isn’t a more celebrated writer and commentator on African cultural affairs. I’ve never yet heard him on radio, re-telling episodes from his memorable life. Our loss. Africa is moving forward, but to understand the Africa of today we need to pay attention to its recent past as well as its early colonial history. Ian’s unassuming witness of African tribes as they slowly emerged into the world of the 1970’s is unparalleled for its authenticity and depth of experience. This recent memoir is his best constructed yet; a seriously informative tale for anyone who wants to know about the real Africa beneath the surface of today’s mobile phones and pre-loved designer jeans. Full review...
Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas by Oscar Goodman and George Anastasia
I've a confession to make. I've done something which I tell our reviewers they must never do: I took a book to review which I didn't expect to like. The Mafia, the mob - call it what you will - are not people I admire and I thought it would be a small step to extend that to an attorney who defended them. Las Vegas? Well, it's not going to be my destination of choice. I'm not against gambling, but I struggle with the concept of travelling to a city that revels in it. Oscar Goodman says that had he been the benevolent dictator of Las Vegas rather than the mayor he would have legalised prostitution and drugs. Hmm... This book was going to be one of those that I threw against the wall in disgust, wasn't it? Full review...
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun
In the autumn of 2003 James Lasdun taught a fiction workshop as part of the graduate writing programme at a place he calls Morgan College. On all such courses the quality of the students is very variable but one writer stood out as having talent. He calls her Nasreen. He offered help over and above the course but Nasreen read a personal interest into this - which wasn't in any way reciprocated. An email correspondence which had been friendly turned nasty, with accusations that Nasreen's work had been stolen to sell to other writers, that he had had an affair with another student and that he had arranged for Nasreen to be raped. Anti-semitic comments were made. Obsessive love had turned to obsessive hate. Full review...
Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan
When Kelly leaves the USA for a life-changing trip around the world, her goal is not to end up working as a nanny in suburban Sydney. And her goal is definitely not to turn into her mother in the process. She doesn’t realise it at the time, but as this memoir shows, there are worse things that could happen. Full review...
The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort
As if we didn't have enough excuses to appreciate the 'Masters of the Universe' of the financial sector. After the tax dodging, the bonus scamming, price fixing and the valiant attempt to bring down the entire world economy comes Jordan Belfort aka the Wolf of Wall Street. To be fair to Belfort, he plied his trade long before the most recent financial meltdown. Still, he's managed to piggy back the latest crash via a best selling book which has been re-released to coincide with a film adaptation starring Leonardo Dicaprio. Full review...
Play It Again: An Amateur Against The Impossible by Alan Rusbridger
I’ve maintained for a long time that I’ll read anything, if it’s well-enough written. So it was with this fascinating memoir, even though it’s a year in the life of an amateur pianist, and I don’t play the piano – or indeed a note of music. I couldn’t even have placed the name Alan Rusbridger in his professional role before I read the book. A quick browse through the first couple of pages on Amazon revealed that the author could indeed tell a clear story: it is his stock-in-trade as Editor of the Guardian. And the book duly held me through a messy, interrupted week of bedtime reading. Full review...
Born in Siberia by Tamara Astafieva, Michael Darlow and Debbie Slater
I tend to shy away from reviewing book titles, but this time it seems appropriate – here it's a title that doesn't tell you the half of the story. As much as Tamara Astafieva was born in Siberia, and returned there several times, for many different reasons and with many very different outcomes, this is much more of a picture of the Soviet Union as we in Britain think of it – Moscow, a bit of Saint Petersburg, and little else. That's not a fault – and again it's not half of the story. The story here is so complex, so rich with detail and incident, and itself came about in such an unusual way, that any summary of the book has its work cut out in defining its many qualities. Full review...
The Dog Nobody Loved by Jon Katz
When we first meet Jon Katz he's not in a good place: his marriage of thirty-five years was breaking up and he was close to a nervous breakdown. He didn't need any more problems. He particularly didn't need a young rescue dog, a Rottweiler/Shepherd mix, who'd been living wild, to contend with and to upset the fragile equilibrium of the life he lived with his animals on Bedlam Farm. Frieda was near feral but devoted to her rescuer, Maria Wulf and it was Maria who was at the centre of this conundrum. Katz was spectacularly disconnected from the world - and Maria was the only person to whom he seemed able to talk, but to connect with Maria he had to connect with Frieda too. Full review...
Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins by Gavin Francis
I know two books don't make a genre, but twice in recent years I have read autobiographical travelogues of men who felt too much was going on in their lives and their surroundings, and took themselves off to remote, isolated, extremely cold and inhospitable places. One went to the shores of Lake Baikal, and shared his days hunting, fishing, drinking and reading with only a few very distant neighbours. Gavin Francis took himself south, to the edge of the Antarctic ice, to spend a year as a scientific doctor. He wasn't able to be completely as alone as some have been in the past – even if he hid himself away in isolation before the week-long annual changeover of staff was through. Francis ends up with a baker's dozen of companions, in a place where – apart from the ice, sealing things up – only two lockable doors exist. You might think this was a large group of people for someone wanting to be alone, but the very tenuous and isolated feel of the place in the huge emptiness of the landscape is the main point of this book – that, and communing with emperor penguins… Full review...
Harry: My Autobiography by Harry Redknapp
Everybody with an interest in football knows who Harry is. The cover of his book won't tell you who he is, but if you're not in the know it's Harry Redknapp - football manager and for many of us, something of a national treasure. He's the manager who's seen it all, having started at rock bottom - a 70s Portakabin at Oxford City - and risen to the heights of managing Tottenham Hotspur in the Premiership. At the same time he was the popular choice for the England Manager's job when Capello threw in the towel. It's fair to say that Harry has lived his football life to the full and anyone buying this book will get their money's worth. Full review...
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
When I began reading this book I wasn't entirely sure that I liked it. I didn't quite know how to take the Nina from the title. She's a twenty year old Nanny, employed by the editor of the London Review of Books and living near Regent's Park in North London. The book contains her letters to her sister, Victoria living at home in Leicestershire, and tell of the events and happenings in her life as a Nanny and then, going on, in her life as a student at Thames Polytechnic. Initially it felt like she was name dropping - Alan Bennett lives over the road and drops in for dinner most days; the father of Will and Sam, the two boys she is nannying, is Stephen Frears; down the road lives Claire Tomalin and her partner Michael Frayn...and yet, given chance, you begin to see that she isn't awed by the notoriety of these people (indeed, she tells her sister that Alan Bennett was in Coronation Street!) and actually they are just the neighbours and so it is less important that Alan Bennett (AB as he's referred to in the book) comes around for dinner every night since he isn't there for fame value but rather for his own unique place in this rather crazy family life memoir! Full review...
Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively
Now aged 80, Penelope Lively, the Booker Prize-winning author of twenty works of fiction including Moon Tiger (1987) and How It All Began (2011), is increasingly conscious of death approaching. It may be true that, as concluded in Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes, 'we cannot truly savour life without a regular awareness of extinction', but this memoir is less a memento mori than an agreeably scattered tour through Lively's life and times. Full review...
