Publication date: 2006-06-02
Dewey code: 838.91209
RRP: £9.95
Price: £5.37
Review On Hashish / Harvard University Press:
Publication date: 2003-08-01
RRP: £16.95
Price: £11.18
Review Memories: Incorporating "Perverse and Foolish" and "Memory in a House" / Oldknow Books:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-03-03
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £7.99
Price: £0.70
Review Wrong Rooms: A Memoir / Scribner:Wrong Rooms is a deeply moving memoir of what it means to watch the love of your life die before your very eyes. In 1992 Mark Sanderson, a respected writer on London magazine Time Out, had an unlucky love life which had left him feeling like "a pallid, lonely Englishman". Deciding to put an advert in a lonely hearts' column, he received a reply from an Australian called Drew, "a sci-fi-loving computer nerd who told lousy jokes". Inevitably he replied, and over the next two years, they fell in love. "Drew made me happier than I had ever been before. He took me to places I never expected to see" writes Sanderson. But in April 1994 Drew was diagnosed with skin cancer. Within three months he was dead. Wrong Rooms is the emotionally raw story of Sanderson's life with Drew, from domestic bliss through sickness and finally slow, painful death. The early sections of the book honestly evoke their blossoming relationship, as well as offering a deft portrait of gay life in 90s London. [+]Sanderson writes with a clarity and sincerity that is all the more extraordinary because of the contrast between his life before and after Drew: "we entered a grave new world of waiting rooms, consulting rooms, hospital wards and theatres. The facts that our lives had only just changed for the better made the shock even worse". In the final moments with Drew Sanderson "experienced true horror for the first time", and at times it feels almost too intimate to read on. The book is clearly a cathartic experience for Sanderson; it is also probably one of the most painfully honest books about the loss of a lover to be written in a long time. -Jerry Brotton.
Publication date: 1996-09
Dewey code: 810
RRP: £6.69
Price: £3.34
Review 32 Short Views of Mazo de La Roche / ECW Press:
Creator: Demi
Publication date: 1997-04
Dewey code: 895.6132
RRP: £12.77
Price: £5.29
Review Grass Sandals: The Travels of Basho / Atheneum Books:
Publication date: 2007-10-12
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £11.99
Price: £5.41
Review Jack Kerouac's American Journey: The Real-life Odyssey of "On the Road" / Thunder's Mouth Press:
Publication date: 2002-02-21
Dewey code: 823.8
RRP: £19.50
Price: £11.03
Review Such Silver Currents: The Story of William and Lucy Clifford, 1845-1929 / Lutterworth Press:
Publication date: 1990-05-01
Price: £2.99
Review Durrell, Gerald, "My Family and Other Animals": Notes (York Notes) / Longman:
Publication date: 1984-04-01
Dewey code: 813.52
RRP: £21.50
Price: £40.66
Review Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer / Indiana University Press:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1999-11-09
Dewey code: 790
RRP: £9.99
Price: £16.98
Review Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life / Rebel inc.:
Publication date: 2001-01-11
Dewey code: 821.4
Price: £25.00
Review The Satyr: An Account of the Life and Work of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: An Account of the Life and Work of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester / Weidenfeld & Nicolson:Rochester remains the sexiest poet England has produced, living an exceedingly colourful life in the early years of the Restoration. Cephas Goldsworthy's The Satyr tells us, from its title, the perspective it takes on this extraordinarily talented but sex-mad poet. It is a vigorous, broad-stroke biography and as such is a very entertaining read. The Satyrs were half goat, half men; and this biography doesn't quite distance itself from a goatishness; which is another way of saying that it is far from being a perfect book. It suffers, for instance, from the lack of any illustrations, particularly on those passages where the author tries to judge the relative beauty of Rochester's many women. The actress Elizabeth Barry, with whom he fell in love, is "a fine creature but not handsome-dark hair, light eyes, dark eyebrows and indifferently plump"; and yet a succession of powerful men fell completely in love with her. A picture would have been nice, if only to satisfy the tabloid curiosity that lurks inside all of us. Goldsworthy's book suffers, also, from a rather clipped written style; page after page of stumpily brief sentences. So, of the young Rochester: "The young Earl was ecstatic. His wit and beauty made him instantly popular. [+]His looks according well with the seventeenth-century ideal. He was tall, graceful and well built, though slender. His wit was subtle and striking". And so on. But Goldsworthy could hardly go wrong with so fascinating a subject, and it is a hard thing to put his biography down. The publishers promise a "swashbuckling" biography, and this is largely what we find. The Satyr mixes a lubricious variety of erotic verse and Carry On sexual encounters with the tragedy of the dying Rochester. He had been poisoned by the mercury with which his physicians had treated his syphilis, a treatment which had, ironically, no effect on the disease. Weak and in an unstable mental state, and probably dying of tertiary syphilis, he renounced his hellraising life on his deathbed and embraced the Church. Goldsworthy's truncated style stresses the point. "He had caught syphilis. It appeared to have gone away, but it had not. It returned to haunt him. It rotted his body and probably also his mind". The spectacle of the lifelong atheist and individualist begging for religious consolation on his deathbed makes for a touchingly downbeat conclusion. Goldsworthy convincingly argues that his famous deathbed conversion "could well have been induced by insanity" since "neurosyphilis can produce powerful religious feelings". All-in-all, a thoroughly man-goatish read. -Adam Roberts.
Publication date: 2001-10-22
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £20.00
Price: £3.33
Review Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet / Weidenfeld & Nicolson:
Authors
- Paul R Spiring
- Brian W Pugh
Publication date: 2008-09-01
RRP: £18.99
Price: £10.83
Review Bertram Fletcher Robinson: A Footnote to The Hound of the Baskervilles / MX Publishing:
Publication date: 1985-08
RRP: £4.25
Price: £0.95
Review Malcolm Lowry Remembered / BBC Books:
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 2007-07-11
Dewey code: 813.54
Price: £8.99
Review Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage International) / Vintage Books:
Publication date: 1998-10-14
Dewey code: 813.52
RRP: £9.95
Price: £6.47
Review Hemingway: The 1930s / W. W. Norton & Co.:
Publication date: 1988-11
Dewey code: 811.52
RRP: £8.73
Price: £98.55
Review A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound / Houghton Mifflin (T):
Creator: Leon Surette
Publication date: 1998-06-30
Dewey code: 811.52
Price: £31.00
Review "I Cease Not to Yowl": Ezra Pound's Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti / University of Illinois Press:
Publication date: 2003-09-26
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £24.95
Price: £16.46
Review Hemingway in Africa / HarperCollins:
Publication date: 2003-04-07
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.99
Review About Friel (About...the Playwrights & Their Works) / Faber and Faber:
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On Hashish, Memories: Incorporating "Perverse and Foolish" and "Memory in a House", Wrong Rooms: A Memoir, 32 Short Views of Mazo de La Roche, Grass Sandals: The Travels of Basho, Jack Kerouac's American Journey: The Real-life Odyssey of "On the Road", Such Silver Currents: The Story of William and Lucy Clifford, 1845-1929, Durrell, Gerald, "My Family and Other Animals": Notes (York Notes), Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, The Satyr: An Account of the Life and Work of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: An Account of the Life and Work of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, Bertram Fletcher Robinson: A Footnote to The Hound of the Baskervilles, Malcolm Lowry Remembered, Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage International), Hemingway: The 1930s, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, "I Cease Not to Yowl": Ezra Pound's Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, Hemingway in Africa, About Friel (About...the Playwrights & Their Works) |
