Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2004-03-04
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.10
Review Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century / Penguin:
Publication date: 2008-05-15
RRP: £6.99
Price: £2.49
Review Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes / Mainstream Publishing:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2000-06-01
Dewey code: 910
RRP: £7.99
Price: £1.75
Review A Year in Provence / Penguin:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-06-20
Dewey code: 781
RRP: £8.99
Price: £1.99
Review Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain / Sceptre:The art of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was all about his private life, but written in a code as obscure as TS Eliot's. In Heavier than Heaven Charles Cross has cracked the code, and this definitive biography is an all-access pass to Cobain's heart and mind. It reveals many secrets, thanks to 400-plus interviews, and even quotes Cobain's diaries and suicide notes revealing an unreleased Nirvana masterpiece. At last we know how he created, how lies helped him die, how his family and love life entwined with his art-plus, what the heck "Smells Like Teen Spirit" really means. (It was graffiti by Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna after a double date with Dave Grohl, Cobain, and the "over-bored and self-assured" Tobi Vail, who wore Teen Spirit perfume; Hanna wrote it to taunt the emotionally clingy Cobain for wearing Vail's scent after sex-a violation of the no-strings-attached dating ethos of the Olympia, Washington, "outcast teen" underground. Cobain 's stomach-churning passion for Vail erupted in six or so hit tunes like "Aneurysm" and "Drain You". ) Cross uncovers plenty of news, mostly grim and gripping. As a teenager, Cobain said he had "suicide genes" and his clan was peculiarly defiant: one of his suicidal relatives stabbed his own belly in front of his family, then ripped apart the wound in the hospital. Cobain was contradictory: a sweet, popular teenage athlete and sinister berserker, a kid who rescued injured pigeons and laughingly killed a cat, a talented yet astoundingly morbid visual artist. He grew up to be a millionaire who slept in cars (and stole one), a fiercely loyal man who ruthlessly screwed his oldest, best friends. [+]Cross, the co-author of Nervmind: Nirvana, the definitive book about the making of the classic album, puts numerous Cobain-generated myths to rest. (Cobain never lived under a bridge-that Aberdeen bridge immortalised in the 12th song on Nevermind was a tidal slough, so nobody could sleep under it). He gives the fullest account yet of what it was like to be, or love, Kurt Cobain. Heavier than Heaven outshines the also indispensable Come As You Are. It's the deepest book about pop's darkest falling star. -Tim Appelo.
Publication date: 2008-09-18
Dewey code: 362
RRP: £6.99
Price: £2.45
Review Broken / Hodder Paperbacks:
Publication date: 2008-07-21
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.19
Review Seve: Golf's Flawed Genius / Robson Books Ltd:
Publication date: 2008-07-24
RRP: £6.99
Price: £2.58
Review Screwed: The Truth About Life as a Prison Officer / Headline Review:
Creator: Damon Hill
Edition: Re-issue
Publication date: 2008-06-19
Dewey code: 796.72092
RRP: £8.99
Price: £2.82
Review Flat Out, Flat Broke: Formula 1 the Hard Way (re-issue) / J H Haynes & Co Ltd:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2002-10-30
Dewey code: 964.64
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.64
Review A Year in Marrakesh / Eland Publishing Ltd:
Publication date: 2009-04-30
RRP: £7.99
Price: £7.59
Review The Real Deal: My Story from Brick Lane to "Dragons' Den" / Virgin Books:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2006-10-23
Dewey code: 942.64084092
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.61
Review War Boy: A Wartime Childhood / Pavilion Children's Books:
Publication date: 2001-04-26
Dewey code: 910
RRP: £8.99
Price: £2.64
Review Extra Virgin: Amongst the Olive Groves of Liguria / Penguin:There is a natural inclination among lovers of the travel journal genre to compare Annie Hawes's Extra Virgin to the idyllic and idiosyncratic tales by Frances Mayes or Peter Mayle. Don't. Her saga has the well-built flow of fiction and self-effacing honesty of a journal. Annie and her sister, Sarah, were in their early 20s when they left London for a 10-week job, pruning roses in the mountainous town of Diano San Pietro in Liguria, Italy. While Sarah is the sensible shadow in the book, it is Annie who falls in love withthe place and then the people and coming up on 20 years lives there still. Youthful mistakes are rectified by a village mystified at the Hawes sisters: mystified that they would want to live in such conditions, that they know so little about olives, wine, food and life and that they are not-horrors-married. Time and time again she is confronted with the reality that is the life of a peasant farmer and in retelling the episodes of her own ignorance, she gives heartfelt flesh and bones to the characters. Still, Hawes deftly drizzles an observer's scepticism about her adventure. "We gloat about the house, the food, the view, everything, whilst pondering the strange fact that if we saw a representation of this sunset on a postcard we wouldn't buy it. We would think it was tasteless. [+]" That she centred the story on the early, impressionable days and the gradual intimacy that developed, gives the book an energy that makes it stand apart. Although the final pages jump haphazardly into the present, Hawes's perspective is instructional about the economic and social changes that in 15 years moved the village from the 19th to the 21st century. Like any story with the ring of truth, Extra Virgin is very much a tale that will age well. -Kathleen Buckley.
Publication date: 2008-11-01
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.42
Review The Last Cigarette: The Smoking Diaries (Smoking Diaries Volume 3) / Granta Books:
Publication date: 2008-04-07
Dewey code: 782.42166092
RRP: £17.99
Price: £4.73
Review Amy Winehouse: The Biography / John Blake Publishing Ltd:
Authors
- William D. Danko
- Thomas J. Stanley
Publication date: 1998-10-26
Dewey code: 305.5234
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.07
Review The Millionaire Next Door / Pocket Books:
Publication date: 2008-05-01
RRP: £18.99
Price: £10.00
Review Thin White Line / Hutchinson:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-06-26
Dewey code: 941
RRP: £9.99
Price: £2.49
Review Churchill: A Biography / Pan Books:Book buyers will never tire of reading about Winston Churchill, for "the greatest adventurer of modern political history" (RA Butler's verdict) led a life of action-packed drama and global significance. Roy Jenkins' Churchill is the latest biography of this great Briton, following closely in the tailwind of Geoffrey Best's Churchill: A Study in Greatness. Where Best restores altitude to Churchill's dipping reputation, seeing off academic critics of the last decade or so, Jenkins provides a jumbo-size old-fashioned biography, lauding his subject's achievements, sympathising with his quirks, and stepping lightly over his well-known mistakes. As he did in his earlier biographies of Dilke, Asquith and Gladstone, Jenkins sticks closely to the published record, utilising in particular the definitive researches of Martin Gilbert, but he brings the authority and the inside knowledge of British politics to his book, slipping in his own memories of Churchill, and his own comparable experience sat the Cabinet table. It is all here, from the Boer Wars to the nuclear bomb, from the hustings in Oldham to the diplomacy of Yalta, with due coverage of the big moments-at the Board of Trade and at the Admiralty in Asquith's peacetime and wartime cabinets, taking on the appeasers in the 1930s and Hitler in the 1940s. All the books are here, and all the political relationships tetchy and touchy alike, from Lloyd George to Baldwin, Smuts to Stalin, and of course, the British people. Like its subject the book is bulky and at times indulgent, but impossible not to enjoy. -Miles Taylor.
Publication date: 2008-10-13
RRP: £17.99
Price: £9.83
Review Every Split Second Counts / John Blake Publishing Ltd:
Publication date: 2007-08-01
Dewey code: 791.45092
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.06
Review Jeremy Clarkson: The Biography / John Blake Publishing Ltd:
Creator: Christopher Reid
Publication date: 2007-11-01
RRP: £30.00
Price: £11.74
Review Letters of Ted Hughes / Faber and Faber:
| Models & Brands:
Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century, Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes, A Year in Provence, Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain, Broken, Seve: Golf's Flawed Genius, Screwed: The Truth About Life as a Prison Officer, Flat Out, Flat Broke: Formula 1 the Hard Way (re-issue), A Year in Marrakesh, The Real Deal: My Story from Brick Lane to "Dragons' Den", War Boy: A Wartime Childhood, Extra Virgin: Amongst the Olive Groves of Liguria, The Last Cigarette: The Smoking Diaries (Smoking Diaries Volume 3), Amy Winehouse: The Biography, The Millionaire Next Door, Thin White Line, Churchill: A Biography, Every Split Second Counts, Jeremy Clarkson: The Biography, Letters of Ted Hughes |
