“…Judy Collins has had an extraordinary life, with many tragic turns…And she’s detailed them, along with many of the better times, in her new memoir…”
Roger Ebert: Life Itself: A Memoir
“…what makes the memoir so much fun is that it seems like Ebert is just as astounded by it as any chronicler of it would be…”
Dan Fante: Fante: A Family’s Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving
Reviewed by Declan Tan Opening with the familiar visions of snow from the likes of Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Dago Red (‘Bricklayer in the Snow’), Dan Fante kicks off, like Svevo and Arturo of his father’s novels, buried in an image of purest white. But this is a damned and dark tale, swirling in […]
Suraya Sadeed with Damien Lewis: Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse
Reviewed by Amanda Simms Suraya Sadeed’s memoirs begin with a dramatic recollection of smuggling $35,000 across the Afghanistan border beneath a burkha in 1998. What follows is a blend of autobiography, the history of the post-Soviet Afghanistan, as well as the development of her charity, Help the Afghan Children. Fleeing to the US after the […]
Caitlin Moran: How To Be a Woman
Bible, manifesto, rant, autobiography, and instruction manual rolled into one. Reviewed by Vikki Littlemore Caitlin Moran’s How To Be a Woman, putting water on the fire of my own year-long hope, is far from a how-to guide to being anything. What it is, essentially, is a reminiscence of a woman’s life, told with an ingeniously […]
Ballard in Shanghai
Chris Hall revisits J.G. Ballard’s childhood and finds the future in the past The opening of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) has young Jim watching British war propaganda films with fellow choristers in the crypt of the Holy Trinity church in Shanghai, which was designed by George Gilbert Scott and built in the […]
Refractions In The Looking Glass: Peter Weissman
Like many of his generation Peter Weissman recalls the ‘60s as a halcyon period of his life and, like his peers, came of age during this revolutionary era marked by social, cultural and political change, relayed in the memoir, I Think, Therefore Who Am I? Dolly Delightly investigates Peter Weissman was involved in both the […]
James Gould Cozzens: Morning Noon and Night
An essay by Pedro Blas Gonzalez on the pleasures of the physical book and reading James Gould Cozzens, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and writer out of time On a recent trip to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, I had the pleasure of visiting one of my all time favorite bookstores. I have been visiting that wonderful […]
Chris Patten – Not Quite the Diplomat interview
Paisley Rekdal: The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee
David Remy Based upon journals kept during the author’s travels through Asia, the essays in The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations On Not Fitting In read less as a search for family roots than an investigation into how society’s attitudes about race shape cultural identity. According to Rekdal, the daughter of a Chinese […]
William S. Burroughs: Last Words
Nathan Cain The works of William Seward Burroughs have always, even among those who think themselves the hippest of the hip, been considered a bit much. Without a doubt, Ginsberg and Kerouac have been the most popular authors of the Beat movement, but the fact remains that Kerouac’s reputation is based on one work of […]
Tom Baker: Who On Earth Is Tom Baker?
Robin Askew At the risk of turning into one of those dreadful thirtysomething nostalgia bores, the Tom Baker incarnation of Dr Who has a special place in the hearts of those of my generation. Forever fixed in my mind is the time I queued for hours with hundreds of other grubby pre-teens in a smalltown […]