Tag: autobiography

Book review: Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla

1 Comment

brown baby book coverJust when I’ve got used to the recent trend of memoirs written in the form of a series of essays, journalist and novelist Nikesh Shukla adds a new twist in his book Brown Baby. While each chapter takes a different topic from his own life, they are not essays but instead letters to his eldest daughter, affectionately nicknamed Ganga. 

Except that his daughter is still young (under 10, I believe) so she most likely won’t be reading this book for a while yet. It’s certainly not written as though it’s intended for primary-school-aged children and Shukla acknowledges a few times that his intended audience won’t be his first reader, that she will come to it in several years’ time, if at all.

So why this format? It’s a hook, of course; not many books are written in second person. And it was probably a useful exercise for Shukla to organise his thoughts when approaching writing this. But it does also add a layer of meaning for us readers who aren’t children of Shukla’s. Initially it feels intrusive, like this is genuinely a personal letter from a father to a daughter, in which he opens up to her for possibly the first time. But once I got past the feeling I was eavesdropping, I think the format made this more impactful.

Continue reading “Book review: Brown Baby by Nikesh Shukla”

Book review: Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci

1 Comment

Taste book cover

I’ve had a soft spot for actor Stanley Tucci since his brief stint on ER, though I was aware of him before that. His food-and-travel TV show Searching for Italy is a true delight, a relentlessly positive journey around the gastronomic delights of probably my favourite cuisine, with the gorgeous backdrop of Italy’s stunning scenery.

Between making series one and two, Tucci wrote a memoir – Taste: My Life Through Food. As the title suggests, he tells his life story through memories of meals, foods, cooking and eating. Despite his fame and years of worldwide travel, family and home seem to be hugely important to Tucci – and central to both, for him, is food.

He says this emphasis on food is a legacy of his Italian heritage. It certainly sounds like his childhood home was filled with food far more delicious – and healthy – than his school friends’. A year of his youth was spent in Italy, a revelation of new foods and ingredients.

Continue reading “Book review: Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci”

The years slip by, stealthily, on tiptoes; they whisper behind our back, making fun of us

The Sum of Our Days book coverThe Sum of Our Days
by Isabel Allende
translated from Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden

This is the third volume of memoir that Allende wrote, which is perhaps an odd place to jump into someone’s life. When I bought this I was attracted purely by her name, after having read and loved House of the Spirits. But it was made extra odd by the circumstances in which this book was written. Allende’s daughter Paula died in 1992. The following year she published her second memoir Paula, mostly written while Paula lay in a coma that they knew she probably wouldn’t wake up from. She started writing this third memoir after Paula’s death and addresses it directly to her daughter, updating her on the extended family as if she had moved away rather than died.

Allende talks candidly about her writing process, her relationships, her hopes and fears, along with all the details of her life. And Allende’s life is surprisingly eventful. Admittedly, this book covers 13 years but the big stuff all happens in the first couple of years following Paula’s death.

Continue reading “The years slip by, stealthily, on tiptoes; they whisper behind our back, making fun of us”

She had once been threadbare, with seven lives to weave from darkness

Betty Shabazz book coverBetty Shabazz: a Remarkable Story of Survival and Faith Before and After Malcolm X
by Russell J Rickford

A late-night read on my Kindle while trying to get the dog to sleep, I was starting to feel bad about how long it was taking me to read this autobiography until I saw on Goodreads that it’s over 600 pages. In fairness Dr Betty Shabazz lived a full and fascinating life that deserves every one of those pages. She was so much more than Mrs Malcolm X, though of course that marriage made her famous and opened the door for her to be an activist and ambassador.

Rickford says in his introduction that he will concentrate on Betty’s life before and after Malcolm, but inevitably their seven years of marriage form a lot of the narrative and at times this veers into being yet another Malcolm X or Nation of Islam biography. He also refers to her as “the widow” a lot, which somewhat undermines his stated mission to depict her as more than that role. Not that it was easy role to hold.

Continue reading “She had once been threadbare, with seven lives to weave from darkness”

Cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers

Kitchen ConfidentialKitchen Confidential
by Anthony Bourdain

Just as it pleased me that my Dad gave me copies of this book and Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto in the same parcel, it also pleased me to read them one after the other. Aside from the titles, I’d say they have zero in common, but I very much enjoyed both books.

The book that made Bourdain famous is a highly entertaining memoir about his career in the restaurant business, from washing up as a summer job, to being a head chef far too young to maintain his success, to having drug problems and clawing his way back up to the top job.

This isn’t a straightforward memoir. Essays on various aspects of working in a busy kitchen are interspersed between recollections of specific periods in Bourdain’s life. He starts with his childhood discovery of really good food on a summer trip to France. After recounting his training and career, he skips to an essay titled “Who cooks?”, which describes general and specific traits of kitchen staff. And it’s not a pretty portrait.

Continue reading “Cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers”

Our father refused to compromise, and live a life of silence in the face of oppression

2 Comments

burying the typewriter coverBurying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police
by Carmen Bugan

This is my Romania selection for the EU Reading Challenge, and it’s so far my only book in this challenge that was originally written in English. I remember adding this to my wishlist when it was first published. Past me was smart.

It’s a memoir of the author’s first 18 years, when she lived in Romania. She and her family left Romania in late 1989 under threat of death and this is Bugan’s story of how they reached that point. It’s very much told from her own point of view, as the oldest child of Ion Bugan, who was twice imprisoned for protesting Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime.

The book opens with Carmen’s early childhood, which was idyllically happy. Though her father was an activist long before his marriage and her birth, and never stopped secretly protesting, she was oblivious for many years. As the 1970s turn into the 1980s, the warning signs appear (with of course decades of hindsight). When Carmen turns 11 she begins to pay attention to the radio programmes her parents listen to; to the food shortages and fights over rationing on the streets; to the arguments her parents have about moving near to the border and becoming self-sufficient.

Continue reading “Our father refused to compromise, and live a life of silence in the face of oppression”

I still find “Negro” a word of wonders, glorious and terrible

Negroland: a Memoir
by Margo Jefferson

This is an unusual memoir. It’s heavily stylised, experimental even, but it’s also rather scholarly in its approach to the historical context of Jefferson’s own life.

Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 and raised in a well-to-do black family in Chicago, part of a black elite society with its own specific rules, norms and challenges. And this is what she documents. It’s an unusual subject for a memoir, and in keeping with that, often doesn’t feel like a memoir at all. Jefferson doesn’t bare her soul, or reveal any shocking family secrets. She doesn’t even stick to first person, slipping in and out of referring to herself in the third person.

There is a lot of background information provided about the formation of America’s black elite, which at first felt a little excessive and/or dry until I realised how recent it all was, and in fact most of the people she refers to turn out to be family friends. There is also a lot about physical appearance – how people with different types of hair handled it, how nuances of skin colour and facial shape could affect your place in society. Usually I could not be less interested in hair and make-up, but of course its relevance to this story is rather different. Because even though Jefferson was and is rich, educated and well-connected, she and her friends and family cannot get away from the fact that they are black and therefore different.

Continue reading “I still find “Negro” a word of wonders, glorious and terrible”

Sometimes we don’t want to be tethered to yesterday

spectaclesSpectacles
by Sue Perkins

This memoir by beloved comedian and TV presenter Sue Perkins jumped out at me when browsing one of our local charity shops, as I was looking to add some comedy to my book shelves and this seemed like just the thing. One the one hand, I was right that it would be funny, on the other it also made me cry no less than three times. Damn it Sue with your sweet, touching moments. And dead pets.

I’d like to claim to be an early fan of Sue, having watched her first TV shows Light Lunch and Late Lunch, back in the 90s, but the truth is that they followed years of stand-up comedy that I of course knew nothing about. Sue is yet another alumnus of the Cambridge Footlights society, and gives a brilliant description of the drab, dingy basement that is the Footlights theatre. This is also where she met long-time comedy partner Mel Giedroyc, who in this book (and, I assume, in life) is the butt of many a joke, primarily about her being two years older than Sue.

Sue is a good writer, whether talking about her family, her career, her loves or her pets. Her timing is spot-on, knowing when to hit the sad button and when to lighten the mood with a joke with the canny judgement of Spielberg. She’s not afraid of sincerity about tough subjects and the chapter about her break-up with a long-term partner after getting back into TV work and running a bit wild is a little painful to read as it seems to betray lingering feelings.

Continue reading “Sometimes we don’t want to be tethered to yesterday”

Autumn reads in brief

These are some very brief reviews indeed because I have had so much else on this month, I’m frankly amazed I’ve found time to read at all. Before I zone out in front of another half-dozen episodes of The Big Bang Theory, here is what I’ve been reading.

 

pride of baghdad

Pride of Baghdad
by Brian K Vaughan (writer) and Niko Henrichon (artist)

This is a beautiful, moving and unusual perspective on war. It takes as inspiration the 2003 news story that four lions escaped Baghdad Zoo during a bombing raid in the Iraq War. Vaughan and Henrichon give the lions names and personalities, and this does result in some anthropomorphising, but that can be forgiven because the result is so good.

Continue reading “Autumn reads in brief”

There were no slow degrees of consciousness

books baguettes bedbugsBooks, Baguettes and Bedbugs
by Jeremy Mercer

I’ve seen this book recommended by lots of people over the years, but I must admit, all I knew about it was that it’s about the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, a tourist attraction I’ve never visited, and knew of only as a famous bookshop associated with some famous authors and artists. So I learned a lot, and completely fell in love with the shop and its story.

I’ve been to Paris twice, and travelled through it another two or three times, and it’s a little crazy that a famous English-language bookshop near the city centre wasn’t on my list of attractions to visit. It certainly will be next time, though it won’t be quite the same shop that Mercer describes.

First, I learned that the current incarnation of the bookshop, on Rue de la Bûcherie, is not the same as the first bookshop by that name, which was opened and run by Sylvia Beach from 1919 until 1940. That shop had its own wonderful history with colourful characters who have popped up in various things I’ve read, but Mercer for the most part skips past all that to the second Shakespeare and Company bookshop, which was opened in 1951 by George Whitman. He originally called his shop Le Mistral, but changed it in 1964 to Shakespeare and Company in tribute to Sylvia Beach, following her death.

Continue reading “There were no slow degrees of consciousness”