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  This book is the third of three books I was given as Christmas presents and I saved this one until last as it is non-fiction and I didn't feel ready to tackle it just after Christmas. It's a biography of George Orwell and the main focus is the time he spent on the Outer Hebridean Island of Jura.  I must confess that I have only read one of Orwell's books as a set book at school, and I can't say I enjoyed it very much, so I never went on to read 1984 or any of his other works.  The style of writing here struck me as being more of a research paper than a mass market biography as the text is often supplemented with superscript numbers leading to endnotes, and those take up twelve pages at the back.  There are also plenty of quotes from books and letters used to support the narrative and this book is clearly aimed at students of Orwell and other literary types rather than casual readers.    Orwell was born in India in 1903 in the heyday of the British Empire ...

  As you get older you start feeling a responsibility to preserve what you know about family history and this is why Michael Palin felt he he had to write the story of his Great Uncle Harry.   Some years ago an elderly cousin of his father passed on to Palin a box of photographs and papers that had come from down from her grandparents (his great grandparents), and as she had no children, she gave it to him to keep it in the family.  For a long time everything just sat in a box as there were other more pressing projects to deal with, but when working on a documentary about the last days of the First World War, Palin found his great uncle's name carved on a memorial at the site of the Somme battlefields.  When he discovered that there was no grave to visit and Harry's final resting place was 'Known Only Unto God', he knew he had to know more. Writing a book like this is a lot harder than it looks because the old family notebooks and papers only gave the bare outli...

When author Martin J. Sherwin first signed a contract to write a biography of Robert Oppenheimer in 1979, he knew he was taking on a big project and thought it would take four to five years to complete.  In the end, his estimate was out by about twenty years, even after enlisting the help of Kai Bird to assist with the writing during the last five years. As he began to interview people who had known Oppenheimer, more and more information came to light, including over ten thousand pages of information taken from the FBI alone.  There were so many sources of information to consider that Sherwin quickly realised that the study was widening to take in far more than 'Oppie's' life story, and would have ramifications that shed light on the state of America during Oppie's time. As work on the book progressed, many other American institutions and foundations got involved and provided both financial and research assistance to help create a document that was to be a definative ac...

  This is a biography but I don't think you will find many others like it.  Maggie O'Farrell seems to have had more than her fair share of near-death experiences, and all this trauma allowed for seventeen chapters with a different traumatic event every time. Some of the events are health related, but on several occasions something just happened out of the blue that could have ended her life in an instant.  Obviously she has survived everything that has been thrown at her, but it does make you wonder why some people seem to have so much to deal with when others sail through life with hardly a bump in the road.  She nearly died from a childhood illness and then had to spend a couple of years in a wheelchair and never fully recovered all her muscular tone or brain reaction times.  That residual low level of disability then went on to cause her great problems in childbirth, and on two other occasions she nearly drowned because her brain couldn't calculate how she wa...

This is a biography, but after reading it, I feel it is so much more.  It not only covers the lives of Mike Parker and his partner Preds, but also the lives two older men who they were so similar that it was like seeing themselves forty years down the line. The older men, George and Reg, had lived through a period of time when homosexuality was still illegal, but then survived to see state recognition of same sex relationships in 2005.  The new legislation allowed for Civil Partnerships that provided financial security for couples, (same sex marriage followed in 2014) and  George and Reg were the some of the first in their area of Wales to have the ceremony after living together for almost sixty years. Between the two couples, the book covers the history of British attitudes towards homosexual men from the time of the second world war through to present day. Before the laws changed, men lived in constant fear of being 'found out' and imprisoned, and casual use of an endea...

  As I had just finished Chris Packham's memoir, I was in the mood to continue on a natural theme so when I spotted Alys Fowler's book on the 'Recommended' table in the library, I decided to give it a go. This one doesn't have the gripping intensity of Packham's book as Alys Fowler has a much gentler tone and there are sections that are so laid back that I almost got the impression that she was hoping I wouldn't notice what she had written. The full title of the book is: 'Hidden Nature, A Voyage of Discovery' and that clearly has the dual meaning of both environmental and personal discovery.  There are two themes running all the way through as Alys takes up paddle boating through the network of canals around Birmingham at around the same time she began to think that she is probably gay. This would not normally be a problem, but Alys was married to a man at the time, and although she still loved her husband, she couldn't deny her changing sexualit...

  Ooof.  This one got me and it's still getting to me now.  I didn't expect to have so much in common with a young woman of Korean heritage, but feelings of grief and loss are universal, and in that, we are all one and the same. My mother died ten years ago when I was in my mid-fifties, but as Zauner observed, we are all children again when our parents are dying.  Mum and I hadn't always seen eye to eye but as she declined, an unspoken truce was called, and we suddenly appreciated what we had in each other and tried to make amends.  As I read through the book, I recognised the desire to demonstrate things I had learnt from her.  Zauner cooked traditional Korean food for her mother and I poached haddock and cut little sandwiches for mine. Even when you know it is coming, nothing prepares you for the death of the parent, and I think Zauner was quite masterful in describing the times both before and after her mother died.  When the final breath is taken, ...

One Friday evening, way back in the early 1970s, my father and I were making our weekly visit to the town library when I came across a book documenting the illustrations painted by Norman Rockwell.  It was a big colourful coffee-table book, and I was usually encouraged to leave those alone, but this time Dad was just as keen as I was to borrow it because 'Norman Rockwell is the greatest illustrator in the world.'   He was not wrong and I have remained a loyal fan of Mr Rockwell ever since. I always meant to track down a copy of the book to have for myself, and while I was looking for it online recently, I came across this great lump of a biography that I didn't even know existed.  As Christmas was just around the corner, one of my dear sons offered to buy it for me as a present and I can honestly say I have loved every page of it.  In fact I loved it so much that I re-organised all our bookshelves so that my art section is now at nose level in the dining room. N...

Published: 2021, Penguin Random House Genre: Biography/Self Help Themes: Will Smith My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤ I don't usually write a synopsis as part of my book reviews but I think I'll make an exception here because it won't take long.   Synopsis:  I am the greatest thing on two legs and whatever you do you will not be better than me. I really enjoy watching Will Smith's films, and as you can see from the photograph above, our family has contributed to his fortunes over the years.  The problem I had with his memoir is that it comes across as the latest marketing exercise for the Will Smith brand.  I felt that the whole project has been devised to move him across from his reputation for goal orientated high achievement to the new zeitgeist of emotional intelligence and vulnerability. Of course Oprah Winfrey is the undisputed queen of this new world, so even the mighty Will Smith had to obtain her stamp of approval before moving forward.  There wa...

  Published: November 2020, Crown Publishing Group Genre: Non-fiction Themes: biography, American politics My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤❤ I was given a copy of A Promised Land by Barack Obama for Christmas and finally finished it a few days ago.  It's a big book, with 700 pages of tightly packed text, so I couldn't easily read it in bed and had to work through a few pages at a time when I was sitting downstairs. I asked to have this book as I am a big fan of both Barack and Michelle Obama, and I already have other books they have written on our bookshelf.  I first became interested in Obama during his presidential campaign in 2007, when I read an extended article in the Sunday Times describing his aspirations, and how he was reaching out to ordinary people who had never voted before.  I was immediately struck by his caring attitude towards forgotten sections of the population and the way he conveyed his ideas without ever talking down to people. When he was el...

  Published: November 2020, Hodder and Stoughton Genre: Autobiography and biography Themes: family relationships, yorkshire, cricket, television My rating (out of 5): ❤❤ Like Father, Like Son by Michael Parkinson is a new book that feels as though it has been pulled together in haste after an emotional interview on television with Piers Morgan for 'Life Stories'.  During the interview, a now octogenarian Michael Parkinson, was reduced to tears as he recalled his relationship with his father and the strength of emotion that burst forth surprised him as his father has been dead for over thirty years. Michael Parkinson's son Andrew had been pushing for a book about the strong bond between Michael and his father, John William, since the publication of Michael's autobiography, Parky, in 2008 but Michael had always resisted writing such a book.  He felt he had already covered all there was to say about his father in various short pieces previously published, and he wanted ...