The Round-up: People’s Lives
From America to China via the Sudan and Kenya, from stage and screen to science and literature, here are fifteen of the very best and most intriguing biographies and memoirs you could hope for, all from the Bookhugger publishers…
William Golding, by John Carey
The first biography of Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding by celebrated writer and critic, John Carey. In 1953, William Golding was a provincial schoolteacher, writing books in his breaks, lunch hours and holidays. His work had been rejected by every publisher he sent it to – until an editor at Faber pulled his manuscript off the rejection pile. This was to become Lord of the Flies, a book that would sell in its millions and bring Golding worldwide recognition.
Drawing almost entirely on materials that have never before been made public, John Carey sheds new light on Golding. Through hundreds of letters, unpublished works and Golding’s intimate journals, Carey draws a revelatory and definitive portrait of an extraordinary man. In an absorbing and compelling narrative, he reveals a many-sided figure: a war-hero, a reclusive depressive who considered himself a ‘monster’, a family man, a victim of fears and phobias who battled against alcoholism, and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.
Syd Barrett, by Rob Chapman
By February 1972, it was effectively all over for Syd Barrett, founder member and guiding creative force behind the original Pink Floyd. In the summer of 2006 he died at the age of sixty, a remote and sensitive individual whose psychedelic footprints left a trail back to the mid-sixties and the height of the London underground.
With exceptional style and gusto, Syd Barrett dismantles the myth of Loony Syd the Acid Casualty and reveals a young man whose psychedelic parameters expanded too fast, too soon, as his early success with the album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn shocked him into a frenetic pop world he was not yet ready for – and perhaps never even wanted. Maybe, just maybe, Syd was not cut out for the rock ’n’ roll long haul; maybe, like a comet, he was destined to burn bright and leave a long train.
This book is a gateway to a vision of one man’s Arcadia, an exploration of a genius songwriter and artist whose musical influence resonated through punk, post-punk and the artier end of Britpop. Including for the first time extensive interviews with the Barrett family, and with reference to his letters, juvenilia, and work as an artist, Syd Barrett is, finally, the book this most extraordinary of English eccentrics deserves.
Read a review on our sister site, Bookgeeks.co.uk
Class Actor, by Phil Daniels
From his first notable role as a teenage actor alongside Ray Winstone in the cult film Scum, via the central character of Jimmy the mod in the mighty Quadrophenia, to the voice of Blur’s Parklife, Phil Daniels has built a solid reputation as one of Britain’s most talented and well-respected character actors. A graduate of the Anna Scher Theatre in the 1970s, Daniels has always stayed true to his working class roots, lending his roles a much-admired authenticity and integrity. With his distinctive voice, cheeky mistrust of authority figures and wicked sense of humour, Daniels remains a driven individualist committed to his craft.
Daniels’ career covers a period that has seen unprecedented change in UK society, and Class Actor, his first ever autobiography, reads like a provocative popular culture history of the past 30 years. It charts his 1960s childhood in a rundown part of London’s King’s X, his passion for Chelsea FC, his coming of age during punk rock, his anger and disaffection throughout the Thatcher years – perfectly realised in highly acclaimed pieces such as Mike Leigh’s Meantime – through to his role as Kevin Wicks in EastEnders and his place in Britpop’s hall of fame. Class Actor is a lively and entertaining insight into the passions of a unique artist who remains driven to tell ‘ordinary’ people’s lives through drama.
Watch an interview with Phil Daniels
No Angel, by Jay Dobyns
In 2001, Jay Dobyns was the first federal agent to infiltrate the inner circle of the Hells Angels. His aim was simple: to examine the criminal underbelly of the world’s most famous biker group and bring a major case against them. No Angel tells the thrilling, adrenaline-soaked story of one man on the brink of losing himself, and lifts the lid on one of the world’s most infamous underworlds. It is a riveting tale of meticulous undercover detective work and a rare and fascinating glimpse inside the secretive world of outlaw biker gangs.
Read an extract on our sister site Bookdagger.com
The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo
The first full biography of Paul Dirac, the greatest British physicist since Newton - and one of the strangest geniuses of the twentieth century, who may have suffered from autism.
Paul Dirac was a pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert Einstein. He predicted, purely from what he saw in his equations, the existence of antimatter. The youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and almost completely unable to communicate or empathise. His silences were legendary and when he spoke, he betrayed no emotion. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather. He is said to have cried only once, when his friend Einstein died.
Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers in Florida, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac’s massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and the people around him. Dirac had a traumatic relationship with his family: his brother committed suicide, and he hated his father to the end of his life. His political allegiances were radical. His best friend was the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza, and even at the height of the purges Dirac holidayed in the Soviet Union.
Yet Farmelo also reveals a man who, while seemingly lacking in emotion, could manage to love and father a family. He catches Dirac’s absolute belief in the beauty of mathematics with warmth and sympathy. And Farmelo shows that Dirac’s eccentricities may well have stemmed from undiagnosed autism.
Listen to an interview with Graham Farmelo
Country Driving, by Peter Hessler
In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the long-time Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver’s license. For the next seven years he travelledthe country, tracking how the automobile and the improved transport system were transforming China.Hessler writes movingly of everyday people – farmers, migrant workers and entrepreneurs – who have reshaped the country during one of the most critical periods in its history. Country Driving illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against outsiders, is building the roads and factory towns that will shape the twenty-first century.
Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, by Barney Hoskyns
Spanning Tom Waits’ extraordinary 40-year career, from Closing Time to Orphans, Lowside of the Road is Barney Hoskyns’ unique take on one of rock’s great enigmas.
Like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits is a chameleonic survivor who’s achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. From his perilous ‘jazzbo’ years in 1970s Los Angeles to the multiple-Grammy winner of recent years – by way of such shape-shifting ’80s albums as Swordfishtrombones – this exhaustive biography charts Waits’ life step-by-step and album-by-album.
Affectionate and penetrating, and based on a combination of assiduous research and deep critical insight, this is a outstanding investigation of a notoriously private artist and performer – the definitive account to date of Tom Waits’ life and work.
Siberian Education, by Nicolai Lilin
Set in a small and tight-knit community of ‘honest criminals’ in a remote part of Russia, this is a tale of an extreme boyhood – exotic, violent and completely unique. Told from the perspective of a boy gaining his ‘education’ as a member of the Mafia-like Urkas in Transnistria, we get a glimpse inside the strict codes of honour and the rituals of this bizarre community. Besides having a deep distrust of outsiders – especially the police – the community is split into ‘honest’ and ‘dishonest’ criminals and crime is all-pervasive. Even their youngest children are taught to understand violence and when it is appropriate to use it. By the age of six, Nicolai Lilin is given his first ‘pike knife’ by an uncle and by the age of twelve he has been convicted of attempted murder. A huge bestseller in Lilin’s current home country, Italy, Siberian Education is an extraordinary snapshot of a violent world.
At the Water’s Edge, by Sir John Lister-Kaye
For the last thirty years John Lister-Kaye, one of Britain’s best-known nature writers, has taken the same circular walk from his home deep in a Scottish glen up to a small hill loch. Each day brings a new observation or an unexpected encounter – a fragile spider’s web, an osprey struggling to lift a trout from the water or a woodcock exquisitely camouflaged on her nest – and every day, on his return home, he records his thoughts in a journal. Drawing on this lifetime of close observation, John Lister-Kaye’s new book encourages us to look again at the nature around us and to discover its wildness for ourselves. It also forges wonderful connections between the most unlikely subjects, from photosynthesis and the energy cycle to Norse mythology, to weasels and perfume and to the over-population of our planet. At the Water’s Edge is a lyrical hymn to the wildlife of Britain, and a powerful warning to respect and protect it.
Sir John Lister-Kaye on nature writing
Six Months in Sudan, by James Maskalyk
James Maskalyk set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan, in 2007. The newest Médicins Sans Frontières’ doctor in the field, he arrived with only his training, full of desire to understand this most desperate part of the world. He returned home six months later profoundly affected by the experience. Six Months in Sudan is an illuminating and affecting account of saving lives in one of the most harrowing and dangerous places on Earth.
Koestler, by Michael Scammell
Best-known as the author of the classic Darkness at Noon, Koestler was one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals, involved in and commenting on almost every political movement of the twentieth century. As a young man, he was a committed Zionist and moved to Palestine; he was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Franco’s Spain; escaped Occupied France; and was a member of the Communist party for seven years, later becoming one of its fiercest critics with the publication of Darkness at Noon.
Without sentimentality, Scammell gives a full account of Koestler’s turbulent private life: his drug use, manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation of rape, and his startling suicide pact with his wife in 1983. Koestler also gives a full account of the author’s voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside Darkness at Noon as works of lasting literary value.
Michael Scammell creates an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable, and talented writer, once memorably described as ‘one third blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius’.
Chaplin’s Girl, by Miranda Semour
In 1931, City Lights introduced Charlie Chaplin’s new female star to the world. The film – defiantly silent in the age of talkies – was an immediate and international hit. The actress who played the romantic lead had never been on screen or stage before. Chaplin’s film turned her into the most famous girl in the world.
And, like Rhett Butler, the most famous girl in the world didn’t give a damn.
Virginia Cherrill was the beautiful daughter of an Illinois rancher, who ran away to live through some of Hollywood’s wildest years. She was the adoring first wife who broke Cary Grant’s heart when she left him; who turned down the gloriously eligible Maharajah of Jaipur to befriend his wife and rescue her from purdah. Virginia Cherrill presided, during the thirties, over one of England’s loveliest houses, as the Countess of Jersey. Everybody sought her friendship. All that eluded her was love. And when she found it, she gave up all she had to marry a handsome and penniless Polish flying ace, whose dream it was to become a cowboy.
In this glorious, and undiscovered story of Hollywood, international high society, wartime drama and romance, Miranda Seymour works from unpublished sources to recapture the personality of a woman so vividly enchanting that none could resist her.
This is the story of Cinderalla in reverse: of the poor girl who won everything – and gave up all for love. Breathtakingly romantic, exquisitely written, this is the stuff that dreams are made of . . .
The Optimist, by Laurence Shorter
Collapsing stock markets, melting ice caps, floods, tornadoes, terrorism . . . When it comes to bad news, we’ve never had it so good. Perhaps it is time to be a little more optimistic? That’s what Laurence Shorter decided. And that’s why he set himself the challenge of meeting the world’s most cheerful people. Surely with the help of Desmond Tutu, Richard Branson and Bill Clinton, Laurence can find the secret to inner happiness. But first things first – how on Earth is he going to get to meet them?
The Temptress, by Paul Spicer
In Kenya’s ‘Happy Valley’ in the years spanning the 1920s to the 1940s no one paid too much attention to the privileged colonial set as they farmed their estates, partied until dawn and indulged in extra-marital affairs. Not until Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was shot dead at the wheel of his Buick in the early hours of 24 January 1941. Some said the good-looking womaniser had it coming. He was a philanderer who could have had any number of enemies among cuckolded husbands who wanted revenge. Ageing Jock Delves Broughton stood trial for Erroll’s murder but was acquitted and the mystery remained unsolved – until now.
American heiress Alice de Janzé had been conducting a clandestine affair with Joss for years. Married into French aristocracy, her stunning beauty was to prove a fatal lure to men of adventure. Previously tried by a French court for shooting one of her lovers, scandal followed her wherever she went.
She arrived in Kenya as a newly married Countess in the 1920s, but by 1941 she had turned forty and the years of partying had taken their toll. Pushed aside by Erroll for younger lovers, and increasingly isolated, Alice threw herself into an act of desperation, resulting in his murder and her own tragic demise. The Temptress not only solves the mystery of Josslyn Hay’s murder with the utmost conviction – it eloquently paints a portrait of a volatile, captivating woman.
Emergency, by Neil Strauss
With the economic downturn, the hysterical Swine Flu frenzy and the systemic corruption of our political system we need someone to guide us through these difficult times. Emergency tells how Strauss went from shivering the whole night through in a water-logged sleeping bag on a tracking course, with only his broken Blackberry for company, to being the well-trained and even better equipped survival expert he is today. Encountering a host of weird and hilarious characters along the way, Strauss’s timely and wry look at the The End of the World As We Know It will make you glad you chose to be on his side.
