Posts Tagged ‘autobiography’
This Boy’s Life – Tobias Wolff
This Boy’s Life is a memoir of a few years in the life of Tobias Wolff. It is a well constructed story with no wasted words and details how hard it must have been for him growing up. His parents divorced relatively early on and his mother (Rosemary) wandered looking for a place to stay and looking for a man in their lives. Bear in mind this is 1950s America where it was thought every boy needed a father figure in their lives.
His father was profligate, made up stories about himself and changed his name according to what he needed it to be and Wolff was no different. In order to get into a ‘good’ school he created a persona for himself, then he created school reports and referrals to fit that persona, he also embellished his name to Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff, III.
His mother was not good at picking men. Her father was a bully and she seemed to only be able to pick men like that. She eventually married Dwight who she thought was a good pick but he ended up being worse than any other man. He bullied Wolff both physically and emotionally making things challenging for him.
It’s certainly an interesting read, I probably would have read it even without having it as a text as I like memoirs. Wolff is a very good writer, very skilled and you can see where he got some of his skills. At school he helped other boys with their writing, even doing some of their essays for them. He made up stories about what he’d done and went into quite some detail making sure to get the finer points correct.
Wolff was in the Scouting fraternity although this didn’t make him a paragon of virtue. He was in trouble (or should have been in trouble) far too often and he doesn’t pull any punches in detailing many of these incidents in this volume.
This memoir was made into a film in 1993 with Robert de Niro as Dwight and Leonardo diCaprio as Wolff. We saw a little of the movie in class and it was quite powerful.
Warnings: swearing, violence and boys being boys and talking about sex.
The Olive Harvest – Carol Drinkwater
The Olive Harvest is the sequel to The Olive Farm and The Olive Season, it’s a year in Drinkwater’s life, a very hard year during which she and her husband have a car accident and the olives don’t grow well. Drinkwater is probably best known in this region for being the first person to portray Helen Herriot in the television series All Creatures Great and Small. She did a wonderful job and for this reason alone I had to read her book.
I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style. She has a laidback style while giving all the information you need and more. It’s a challenging year for her, after the accident her husband becomes very distant to the point of moving to Paris severing as much contact with her as he can but she keeps trying, sometimes sending produce from the farm and sometimes sending notes. The farm is in Provence, her family remained in England so she dealt with all her problems with the aid of the Arabic Monsieur Quashia, some new friends who told her off for not asking for help and her improving French.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. The writing is just perfect. Drinkwater has this ability to describe each scene and make me feel as if I’m there watching her. She talks about her love of animals, constantly demonstrating this by caring for birds and animals who have been injured and doing her best to avoid having the wild boars, who are causing much damage to her farm, killed but in the end lets the swimming pool clean organise the kill. She manages to convey her negative emotions of the situation while describing the whole event so that we can see it in our mind’s eye.
During this time she is endeavouring to have her olives accredited so she can sell the oil, it’s challenging to get past bureaucracy and her French husband normally handles that side of things but she is forced to do it herself when he goes to Paris. Drinkwater does end up having bees on the property and that is a delight to read about, she describes the problems of transporting the bees even telling us how much the hives weigh.
I can’t tell you much more succinctly, you have to read this book. I’m not normally so forceful with books but this is one of those books everyone should read. There may be swear words but I’ve forgotten.
One Flew into the Cuckoo’s Egg – Bill Oddie
Some of you will know Bill Oddie from The Goodies, others will know him from I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and you might even know of Oddie from his nature series or bird books. He’s done quite a lot of things over the years and is a very big part of my childhood. I used to watch The Goodies and when I found they’d put some of their best episodes on DVD I bought them, made the big mistake of watching them with the kids around…actually I made the big mistake of trying to watch them while working. That was not going to happen, I found myself watching the whole lot and getting absolutely no work done. They’re just as good today as they were in the 1970s, very relevant. When I found Oddie’s autobiography I absolutely had to have it, it was one of those must buys and must keeps.
It’s a fabulous little book, at 308 pages it’s nowhere near long enough for me. I was absolutely fascinated. Oddie talks about his mother and how she spent some years in a lunatic asylum and didn’t really have a relationship with her. He talks about his father and how much of a saint he thinks the man was, he refuses to say anything bad about him. He talks very frankly about his depression and that was really fascinating to read. Not an easy part of his life and it must have been challenging to write down but I’m so glad he did. He completed the book with a series of questions and answers with his alternative self.
One Flew Into the Cuckoo's Egg - Bill Oddie
When I picked it up I expected a well written book with some interesting anecdotes and hopefully a better insight into the man I admired so much. While I got all of this there’s so much missing, I understand you have to stop somewhere but I wanted so much more. In the question and answer section Oddie digressed so many times and it was just interesting to see where he digressed to but his alter ego pulled himself back to the thread of the discussion just as I was getting more involved. While the initial question was something I was interested in and wanted to know about, I was also intrigued by the digression and wanted to follow that line of thought further. I put down this book yelling “more, more, encore”…not really, I put it down very annoyed there wasn’t more and then went to sleep.
This book does beg the question…at what point does one stop an autobiography? In Oddie’s case, just as this particular reader is getting annoyed at having so few pages to go. In other cases it’s just at a particular point in their life. I just want to know how do you know when to stop?
I suspect there’s some swear words in here but I can’t remember any as I was concentrating on the book. I suspect there’s a typo but it could just be that I’ve got the wrong singular spelling of Goodies and don’t ask me why I typed that statement, I don’t have an answer.
Susie’s Story: Surviving in Budapest
Sunday afternoon we journeyed to the past. They say the past is another country and I keep being reminded of it. This was no exception. We went to Makor Library to a book launch, they have enough of them as they sponsor a writing programme called Write Your Own Story.
So many people I know have written their story and had it published through this programme, they are all fairly high quality considering the authors are not professional writers. They are overseen and encouraged by Adele Hulse, who is a professional writer. The programme has been going since 1998 and Sunday’s book was the 98th book to be launched since that time.
It was a lovely book launch. We heard from a very old friend of the author who had come all the way from Perth for the occasion, we heard from Adele Hulse, Cymbalist’s daughter and also Cymbalist herself, no mean feat as she’s getting on to being 90 years old. Everyone spoke very eloquently about the programme and about Cymbalist and her tenacity for the project, she started writing 12 years ago, her staying power is just fabulous for a project such as this.
I do want to encourage everyone to write down their stories. Everyone’s story is important, even if you don’t know how to write, or just think you don’t. Many of these people in the Write Your Own Story programme came from other countries and they’ve written in English and as it’s not their native language they’ve been further challenged. Your story is important, not necessarily to you or even to your children, but to your grandchildren or great grandchildren; people you may not know yet, they have the right to know where they came from to know things about you. It’s also very important from a historical perspective to have people’s stories, the more we have the bigger a picture historians will be able to build.
The Marx Brothers
Growing up without computers and with a black and white television our lives were rather different to today. We spent a lot of time watching television together or playing board/card games (I learnt how to gamble playing solitaire), going out with friends and reading books. Some of our favourite people to watch on television were The Marx Brothers. They were just fabulous and when I grew up and found they had written some books I was quite keen to read them.
If you believe this website then the books are entertaining but not terribly factual and they recommend books that are more accurate with facts. I’m not certain I care too much as I’m totally entertained by the people themselves and the books they wrote are just as entertaining.
I’ve pulled Memoirs of a Mangy Lover by Groucho Marx and Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx off my bookshelf this morning to have a bit of a ramble about them. Memoirs of a Mangy Lover is very entertaining being very much like his onscreen personality but is short on actual facts, or in fact, any facts. Harpo Speaks is an autobiography and is a riotous series of anecdotes about himself and his family in some sort of order. I love both books for different reasons.
I absolutely adored Groucho and his onscreen persona. He was a womaniser with a quick wit and a remarkable ability to dance and caper around. Actually, all the Marx Brothers had that same ability with dancing and capering as they spent many years in vaudeville entertaining all and sundry. They were at their best when they ditched the script and ad libbed.
Harpo was my favourite. He never spoke on film and was the most amazing harpist. Apparently he was told never to speak again after a problem on stage and so in all his films he was silent. He always had lots of things in the inner pocket of his jacket, including a swordfish which he used as a password one day. Anyway, his book is just wonderful and gives a good idea of what it must have been like growing up in his family.
Both books are going back on my shelf but I do recommend them.
Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy – Leah Rabin
I read biographies and autobiographies to find out about other people’s lives, to find out how other people do things and to get a different point of view. In one respect this book was good as it showed me all those things, but on the other hand it was too close to home as I remember some of the incidents discussed and they affected me greatly even though I was half a world away.
Yitzhak Rabin was a peacemaker in Israel and he spent most of his life working towards that goal. He was assassinated by a Jew before he could complete the task. This book was written by his wife, Leah, who was married to him for 47 years and had the enormously hard task of comforting the family, Israel and Jews throughout the diaspora, from what she’s written in the book she didn’t really have a lot of time for her own grief as she was too busy comforting everyone else. Behind every great man is a great woman and this marriage was no exception. Leah Rabin was one such lady, strong, with a mind of her own which was in perfect accord with her husband’s, she was able to slip in with diplomatic statements made at the correct time and was able to make speeches which concorded with Yitzhak’s policies both during and after his death.
When I first started this book it was at the time of my aunt’s death and the book starts with Yitzhak’s assassination. My grief was rather raw already so I didn’t cope at all well with the remembered grief of losing Yitzhak who was Prime Minister of Israel for the second time and had to stop reading it…I find it hard to read through tears. I only picked it up again recently and found it much easier to cope with, the tears still flowed but not as much so I was able to keep reading. I found the book to be very well written with just a few phrases where Leah reverted to Hebrew grammar rather than English grammar. It talked about both of their lives and showed how they both came to Israel, both fought in the War of Independence, how they met and then married. This is not really a book about Yitzhak and his achievements but more a book about the two of them and how they both fought for the Independence of Israel and also for peace.
One thing I found most interesting was during the War for Independence. When I was growing up one of the authors who seemed of great importance was Leon Uris. He wrote a number of books and the one I read was called Exodus which is about the foundation of Israel and the conflicts that were fought in order to bring this about. One of the things I remember quite clearly from the book is the Arabs abandoning their homes and villages before the Jews could get there to fight them and the Jews being concerned for the Arabs and asking the few they saw to stay. Leah does talk about this and talks about the fighting that happened and how the Arabs generally stayed and fought. I never wondered about Uris’ version of those events but now I read about it from a different point of view I have to wonder why he exaggerated this point. Definitely Leah Rabin does mention some of the Arabs and how they evacuated before the Jews got there but quite clearly talks about it as something that happened in places and was not widespread as Leon Uris made me believe.
Leah and Yitzhak Rabin spent some time overseas and she makes it quite clear how they made friends wherever they were and how upset everyone was at Yitzhak’s death.
Anyway, I do recommend this book. I think it is a fairly balanced view of events and does give some insight into both Yitzhak and Leah and how they coped with different problems.
The Whispering Land – Gerald Durrell
This is one of the magical autobiographical books by Gerald Durrell. He was a multi-talented whirlwind who changed the face of zoos and helped to educate people and also to help save some endangered species. I have written about him before so I won’t write much now.
This book is set in Argentina. Durrell searches windswept Patangonian shores and tropical forests in the Argentine for additions to his private zoo in addition to filming as much as possible. He spent a great deal of time with his team looking for elephant seals so as to film them and was quite disheartened. They all sat down to lunch having just given up looking and all of a sudden one of them moved, he was about 10 feet away, his camoflage was so good they hadn’t seen him. It turned out there were several on the beach and it took a great deal of effort to spot them. Durrell then regaled his team with detailed information about the sex life and intestines of the elephant seals until he was told off as they really would prefer to eat their lunch.
Durrell managed to meet the most delightful people in his search for animals. The man I’m going to talk about is Luna. He seemed to be one of the most even tempered people I’ve read about. Apparently he spent a lot of time singing, even starting to sing before opening his eyes in the morning and generally the last thing Durrell heard at night was Luna singing. Thank goodness he could sing better than my father who used his singing instead of injections, people couldn’t wait for the drilling to start so he would stop. Luna was a fine singer and knew many, many songs, he regaled the whole party with a good deal of those songs. Sounds like a lovely man.
Diary of a Mad Cow: A Guide to Bad Mothering – Amanda Cox
This is disclosure time. I’ve been friends with Amanda Cox for a couple of years. I couldn’t get to her book launch so a mutual friend got a copy for me and she very kindly made certain to pass on my request to have it signed upside down, so my copy is signed by the author, but signed my way. I don’t normally worry about author signatures so I figured it had to be different, the thing is, you can’t actually tell as it’s on a blank page!
Diary of a Mad Cow
Anyway, enough rubbish. This book is a diary, it’s the diary of a young mother with boys who don’t do what they’re told and have to get to kinder or school. It’s the diary of a young mother who also runs a business from home and is frantically trying to fit in enough time for the business, the shopping, the housework, the kids and hopefully find there is enough time at the end for her husband and herself, some time out away from the kids and also some sleep. Sleep? I hear her asking, what on earth is sleep? Actually, she’d be rather more colourful with her words, but I don’t use those words.
Anyway, Cox details the highs and lows of having and parenting three boys. She starts at the beginning when the eldest is born and ends eight years later some months after the youngest is born. They are unexpurgated and include her swearing as she can’t find her keys, swearing as she is told off yet again as she appears to be doing the wrong thing with her baby, swearing as she…sorry, she doesn’t swear all the time. Cox tells us to trust ourselves and our instincts as there will always be someone telling parents they’ve done the wrong thing. She includes so many doubts she has about doing the wrong thing and wondering how it will affect her children and will they be totally screwed up by her lack of parenting.
Cox basically tells us what we’re thinking about our own parenting. She is not afraid to let fly with sarcasm and wit to tell people how she feels about being a parent and in the process tells us how we’re thinking. I had my kids 10 years before her and I have girls rather than boys but she seems to have a knack for telling me what I was thinking and feeling when they were the same age.
She also details the darker side of parenting, the side that nobody wants to know about. Cox tells us what really happens when she’s got PND (Post Natal Depression), how she can’t make coffee as she can’t remember if she put the coffee in or the sugar in, how she sometimes can’t work the coffee machine and ends up with coffee everywhere, or maybe just hot water when she’s completely forgotten the coffee. She talks candidly about being pregnant with her second and third children and how the morning sickness can totally take over your life.
I have so much admiration for Cox, she has managed to bring up three boys, study, run a business and deal with the vissisitudes of life with style, wisdom, sarcasm and humour. Her business supports mums and gives them a haven where they can be themselves. She runs a website with a forum, she creates and sells goods, writes blogs, she speaks on TV and radio as well as organising awesome nights out. You may be able to get a copy of the book here if you’re lucky, last time I heard there were very few copies left.
Warnings:
Laughter may happen at any time
Tears will spill over
There are many ‘rude’ words which sometimes add to the laughter
If you’re old, like me, you’ll definitely need good light and reading glasses as the print is very small
Two in the Bush – Gerald Durrell
Just because I really can’t be bothered writing anything of substance today and because I have this book awaiting a review and because I’ve mentioned a rant coming on about this book and also because I had to have a break from Australis Imaginarium (a fantastic book but I want to eek out the fantasticness so I stopped and read something else) I’m reviewing another Gerald Durrell book.
This is another in the series of autobiographical books written by Gerald Durrell to help support the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. Durrell was a seriously amazing man, he started being interested in wildlife from a very early age and some of his books written about his family show just how interested he was, his room was apparently awash with all sorts of animals, birds, insects and spiders. This book is dedicated to showing us the state of conservation of fauna in New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia in the mid 1960s.
Things have changed tremendously since that time and yet in some ways they haven’t changed at all. In the 1960s the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust was the only organisation in the world dedicated to preserving wildlife, to ensuring that wildlife of all kinds were not made extinct and to ensuring their zoo developed breeding programmes for all sorts of animals and birds that were heading for extinction. Nowadays we have so many organisations and I’d suggest that all zoos are dedicated to breeding programmes to ensure extinction doesn’t happen. I’ll just mention a few and if you want to put more into the comments section that’d be good too. We’ve got WWF, World Land Trust and Greenpeace, I’ve chosen these three in no particular order and for no particular reason than that I remembered them, there are a large number of other organisations like these and you can donate money to them or donate your time and energy I’m sure they need more of both.
I’m not going to detail the number of species that were in danger at the time this book was written and show you which ones are now extinct and which are no longer in danger due to the breeding programmes as that would take more time than I have available, it would also not be a review of the book. I’m sure you are aware of some of the fauna that are endangered at present, the whales being fairly high in people’s thoughts.
Now, to the book. Durrell came out to the southern hemisphere with his wife, Jacqui, and a modest film crew to document conservation in this area, most specifically in New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia. Having said that he was only out here for a few weeks and really could not be expected to see everything so if your area is not mentioned then it doesn’t mean conservation wasn’t actually happening there just that he didn’t have enough time. While here he saw some amazing sights and shot some fabulous footage, including getting footage of a live kangaroo birth, one of the first pieces of footage filmed of this amazing creature. He also managed to see the Wrybill in New Zealand which is an amazing bird which seems to walk around in packs while also staying in the same place, you’d have to read the passage to understand, it also has a bent bill. He also managed to film a Leathery Turtle laying eggs and watched the conservation techniques at work.
On with the rant. This is a wonderful book, it is one in a series of wonderful books by the same author but I take exception to this one due to it’s poor proofreading. Durrell is in Melbourne, talking out about Lyrebirds and is taken out to Sherwood Forest to see them and to film them. At this point I was almost shouting in distress as it’s not Sherwood, but Sherbrooke. I’ve been there so many times, I’ve fed the Rosellas (even though you’re not meant to feed them as it makes them lazy) and I’ve seen Lyrebirds there on a number of occasions, one very special occasion we even stopped for several minutes and recorded two Lyrebirds competing in song, one up in the forest on one side of the path and the other down in the forest on the other side of the path – a truly amazing experience. But why couldn’t the proofreader have got it right? Just digressing a little, there’s a fair chance I was actually there on the day he filmed only I wouldn’t remember as I would have been fairly young at the time, I recall visiting there with my family on a number of occasions. I’ve even seen an Echidna there.
Anyway, if you can put aside the proofing of this book then I thoroughly recommend it as it’s a great read.