News Blog @ Wellington City Libraries

Once again Britain is home to many of this month’s picks. They range from singer Rod Stewart, writers Martin Amis, Oscar Wilde and Daphne du Maurier to those who chose to live in that country and are now associated with her, such as Karl Marx and the Americans Nancy Astor and Sylvia Plath.  Stories of six women who made new lives in America are also included in this month’s complement along with an entrepreneurial Kiwi engineer, who invented the electric fence among many other useful things, is celebrated in a new biography.

Something for everybody !! Enjoy this month’s selection.

Martin Amis : the biography / Richard Bradford.
“Martin Amis’s life could itself provide the formula for an enthralling work of fiction. Son of one of the most popular and best-loved novelists of the post-War era, he has forged a groundbreaking manner of writing that owes nothing to the style of his father, nor indeed to anyone else. He relished and recorded the bizarre, turbulent atmosphere of Britain and the US during the 1970s and 80s, arguably the transformative period of the late 20th century. No other contemporary writer has proved so magnetic for the popular press: he has, despite himself, achieved celebrity status. Of late, his reputation as a novelist has been matched by his outspoken, challenging writing on contemporary global politics, and he has earned the status as the Orwell of the early 21st century.” ( Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

O my America! : second acts in a new world / Sara Wheeler.
“After reckoning with the ends of the earth in acclaimed books such as Terra Incognita and The Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler rediscovered America thirty-five years after her first Greyhound trip across the country. She returns in turbulent midlife to trace the steps of six women who fled various sorts of trouble in nineteenth-century England and went to the United States to reinvent themselves. Her travel companions include Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony and author of the biting Domestic Manners of the Americans; the actress Fanny Kemble, who shocked the nation with her passionate first-hand indictment of slavery; the prolifically pamphleteering economist Harriet Martineau; the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, who had never been more than twelve miles from her Yorkshire village before she sailed to the New World; the traveller Isabella Bird, whose many ailments remained in check as long as she was scaling the Rockies; and the novelist Catherine Hubback, niece of Jane Austen, who deposited her husband in a madhouse and rode the brand-new rails to San Francisco.”(Summary from www.amazon.co.uk).

Mad girl’s love song : Sylvia Plath and life before Ted / Andrew Wilson.
“To curtail fears that this latest Plath biography forges already blatant connections between her work and her torrid inner life or her relationship with Ted Hughes, be assured, it is something altogether new. Wilson (Beautiful Shadow) fulfills his title’s promise, divulging her impressive string of romances, love-hate relationship with her mother, and “vampiric” interactions with those close to her, among other atypical and unconventional issues. While the significance of some seemingly frivolous details may appear momentous, it’s refreshing that Wilson does not make Plath’s suicide his focus, just as he examines her earlier, formative publications in magazines such Seventeen, Mademoiselle, and Ladies Home Journal as often-if not more so-as he does her better.’(Wellington City Libraries catalogue note).

Proust’s overcoat / Lorenza Foschini ; translated by Eric Karpeles.
“In the tradition of “The Professor and the Madman” comes the charming, intriguing story of one man’s obsessive search for the personal effects of legendary author Marcel Proust.” (Syndetics summary)

Ceremonies of bravery : Oscar Wilde, Carlos Blacker, and the Dreyfus Affair / J. Robert Maguire.
‘”Ceremonies of Bravery’ is a study of the friendship between the prolific writer Oscar Wilde and Carlos Blacker. The two men met in the 1880s, the period when Wilde was judged by many to be at his best, and Blacker went on to become a trustee of Wilde’s marriage settlement”.(Syndetics summary).

Levels of life / Julian Barnes.
“‘You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed…’ Julian Barnes’ new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded him the 2011 Man Booker Prize described him as ‘an unparalleled magus of the heart’. This book confirms that opinion”.
(Syndetics summary)

Nancy : the story of Lady Astor / Adrian Fort.
“In 1919, Nancy Astor became the first woman to be elected to Parliament. She was not what had been expected. Far from a virago who had suffered for the cause of female suffrage, she was already near the centre of the ruling society that had for so long resisted the political upheavals of the early twentieth century, having married into the family of one of the richest men in the world. She was not even British. She would prove to be a trailblazer and beacon for the generations of women who would follow her into Parliament. This new biography charts Nancy Astor’s incredible story, from penury in the American South, to a lifestyle of the most immense riches, from the luxury of Edwardian England, through the ‘Jazz Age’, and on towards the Second World War: a world of great country estates, lavish town houses and the most sumptuous entertainments, peopled by the most famous and powerful names of the age. But hers was not only the life of power, glamour and easy charm: it was also defined by principles and bravery, by war and sacrifice, by love and bitter disputes.
With glorious, page-turning brio, Adrian Fort has brought to life this restless, controversial American dynamo, an unforgettable woman who left a deep and lasting imprint on the political life of our nation”. (Syndetics summary)

Daphne du Maurier and her sisters : the hidden lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing / Jane Dunn.
“The Du Mauriers — three beautiful, successful and rebellious sisters. Much has been written about Daphne but here the hidden lives of the sisters are revealed in a riveting group biography.’ (Wellington City Libraries catalogue note).

Karl Marx : a nineteenth-century life / Jonathan Sperber.
“Returning Marx to the Victorian confines of the nineteenth century, Jonathan Sperber, one of the United States’ leading European historians, challenges many of our misconceptions of this political firebrand turned London émigré journalist. In this deeply humanizing portrait, Marx no longer is the Olympian soothsayer, divining the dialectical imperatives of human history, but a scholar-activist whose revolutionary Weltanschauung was closer to Robespierre’s than to those of twentieth-century Marxists.” (Syndetics summary)

Legend : from electric fences to global success : the Sir William Gallagher story / Paul Goldsmith.“The story of New Zealand’s most successful exporter and its head, Bill Gallagher, who built on the invention of an electric fence to make the company a world leader in its field. New Zealanders are always being exhorted to take a clever idea and go global. Easier said than done. But one iconic company has been doing just that for over 75 years. Gallagher Industries began in a Hamilton shed in the late 1930s, when a self-taught engineer, Bill Gallagher, came up with a design for an electric fence that transformed New Zealand farming. His sons Bill junior and John took over the business in the 1970s and applied their engineering genius and driving ambition to turn it into one of this country’s most successful companies. Today it employs 600 staff in New Zealand and has distributes its animal containment and security products worldwide.” ( Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

Rod : the autobiography / [Rod Stewart].
“Rod Stewart was born working-class son of a Scottish plumber in North London. He was never, as some stories later had it, a professional footballer or a gravedigger, though he did become a bit of a singer – and a fairly good one at that. This book tells the story of a guy with one hell of a voice and one hell of a head of hair”.(Syndetics summary).

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died (8 April 2013), aged 87. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for  three terms of Conservative-led government in the 1980s, she presided over a country in flux and is the only woman to have held the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to date. A controversial figure, the story of her life and times is fascinating — try our reading and viewing list below, which includes both volumes of her autobiography, as well as other biographical works, a social history of the period she governed in, and films (including Meryl Streep’s turn as The Iron Lady). Have a browse!

Books:

The Downing Street years / Margaret Thatcher. (1993)
“This first volume of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs, which encompasses the entirety of her career as Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher was the towering figure of late-twentieth-century British politics. This is the story of her remarkable life in her own words. This first volume of her memoirs is a riveting first-hand portrait of the events and personalities of her eleven years in power. She recalls the triumphs and the critical moments of her premiership – the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, the Brighton bomb, the Westland Affair and her unprecedented three election victories. Her judgements of the men and women she encountered, whether world statesmen or Cabinet colleagues, are astonishingly frank. She is lavish with her praise; devastating with her criticism. The book reaches a gripping climax with an hour-by-hour description from inside 10 Downing Street of her dramatic final days in office. Margaret Thatcher’s compelling account stands as a powerful testament to her influential legacy” (Amazon.co.uk)

The path to power / Margaret Thatcher. (1995)
“The extraordinary account of Margaret Thatcher’s life up to her dramatic election as the first woman Prime Minister of England in 1979. Margaret Thatcher was the towering figure of late-twentieth-century British politics. This is the story of her remarkable life in her own words. In this second volume of her memoirs, following ‘The Downing Street Years’, she writes candidly about the experiences that propelled her to the very top in a man’s world. Beginning with her upbringing in Grantham, she goes on to describe her Oxford years, marriage to Denis, and entry into Parliament at a time when there were no more than a handful of women MPs. Rising through the ranks to Education Secretary and then Leader of the Opposition, she led the Conservative Party to a historic victory in the 1979 general election, becoming Britain’s first female prime minister. Margaret Thatcher’s compelling account stands as a powerful testament to her influential legacy.” (Amazon.co.uk)

Margaret Thatcher / John Campbell. (2000)
(This title is actually in two volumes, “Margaret Thatcher : the grocer’s daughter” & “Margaret Thatcher : the iron lady.”)
“The first volume of John Campbell’s biography of Margaret Thatcher was described by Frank Johnson in the Daily Telegraph as ‘much the best book yet written about Lady Thatcher’. That volume, The Grocer’s Daughter, described Mrs Thatcher’s childhood and early career up until the 1979 General Election which carried her into Downing Street. This second volume covers the whole eleven and a half years of her momentous premiership. Thirteen years after her removal from power, this is the first comprehensive and fully researched study of the Thatcher Government from its hesitant beginning to its dramatic end. Campbell draws on the mass of memoirs and diaries of Mrs Thatcher’s colleagues, aides, advisers and rivals, as well as on original material from the Ronald Reagan archive, shedding fascinating new light on the Reagan-Thatcher ’special relationship’, and on dozens of interviews. The Iron Lady will confirm John Campbell’s Margaret Thatcher as one of the greatest political biographies of recent times.” (Amazon.co.uk)

Mrs. Thatcher’s revolution : the ending of the socialist era / Peter Jenkins. (1989)
“Peter Jenkins, [when the book was published] Associate Editor and political columnist of the Independent, achieved a reputation, during his years as a political columnist on the Guardian, as the most authoritative, thoughtful and best-informed commentator on the contemporary political scene. Now he has brought his wide experience of current political ideas and personalities to bear in an ambitious and important new book – a study of the phenomenon of the rise of Thatcherism, in his view more of a style than an ideology, but certainly the most significant factor in the transformation of modern British politics. With a remarkable blending of historical knowledge and intellectual excitement, Jenkins examines the emergence and continuing success of Margaret Thatcher against the gloomy background of what he calls ‘the politics of decline’. He shows how the failure of the post-war ‘consensus’, based on the concept of the Welfare State, prepared the ground for Mrs Thatcher’s radical solution to the nation’s growing economic and social problems, Jenkins is the first in his field to distill one lucid narrative from the many complicated stories of the pursuit of growth, the use and misuse of incomes policy, the miners’ strike, the OEC crisis, the Winter of Discontent, the dismemberment of the Labour Party, the evolution of the Social Democratic Party and the impact of the Falklands War.” (Amazon.co.uk)

Reagan and Thatcher : the difficult relationship / Richard Aldous. (2012)
“Aldous, a historian of nineteenth-century British leaders William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli (The Lion and the Unicorn, 2007), capitalizes on records of the interactions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He finds that the archives belie the bonhomie thought to have prevailed between the two conservative leaders and reveal many disagreements during the years (1981-89) they were simultaneously in power. Raising contretemps as they cropped up (the Falklands War of 1982, the 1983 invasion of Grenada), Aldous places them against the backdrop of the principal foreign-affairs theme of the time, the Cold War and the policies adopted toward the new leader of the Soviet Union.” (Booklist)

Rejoice, rejoice! : Britain in the 1980s / Alwyn W. Turner. (2010)
(This one is more of a social history — we’ve included it here as context for the 1980s)
“The Eighties may seem to many of us like yesterday, but in many ways the Britain of thirty years ago was a thoroughly foreign country. During the years when Thatcherism wiped out almost a quarter of Britain’s heavy industry through savagely monetarist policies, a naval Task Force also sailed to re-take an insular outpost in the South Atlantic. In the same decade as the extraordinary pitched battles of the miners’ strike, Boy George sweetly crooned ‘Karma Chameleon’. As the world faced the early days of panic over the AIDS virus, pop stars took to the stage for Live Aid. Alwyn W. Turner’s in-depth history of this most fascinating of decades has been highly praised by distinguished commentators like Dominic Sandbrook and Francis Wheen. If the Seventies, the subject of his previous book, were the last gasp of the old Britain, the Eighties were a truly transitional, politically revolutionary decade, when Thatcherism remade Britain’s economy and its society, but when Britain’s social fabric also changed in many infinitely more encouraging ways. Witty and formidably well-informed on political intrigue, as well as every last soap opera and rock album, this is an exciting piece of genuinely new history.” (Amazon.co.uk)

Websites:

• Coverage of her death over at the Guardian newspaper
• Coverage of her death on The Telegraph
• Margaret Thatcher biography at number10.gov.uk (official site of the British Prime Minister’s Office)
• Margaret Thatcher on Gale Biography in Context (This is a subscription database, so you’ll need to log in with your library card details to view this content — images, audio, video, biographical articles, academic journals, magazine articles and more)

Dramatisations:

The iron lady / a Phyllida Lloyd film. (Starring Meryl Streep)
“A surprising and intimate portrait of Margaret Thatcher, the first and only female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. One of the 20th century’s most famous and influential women, Thatcher came from nowhere to smash through barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world.” (Library Catalogue)

Margaret Thatcher : the long walk to Finchley. (DVD)
“The rise and rise of the iron lady… Margaret Thatcher is one of the world’s most well-known public figures. But how much do we really know about her as a person? In this witty, humorous and imaginative drama, Britain’s first female Prime Minister is portrayed as you’ve never imagined her. An attractive 25-year-old woman up against that most conservative and male of all institutions – the British Conservative Party. Beginning on the night she met her husband-to-be Denis, the film tells of the young Margaret Thatcher’s steely determination to get selected to a ‘winnable’ Tory seat in the Fifties and imagines what might have gone on behind the scenes during her ten-year struggle as she was rejected by a succession of five home counties Tory selection committees and finally – against considerable local opposition – selected for the seat she was to be identified with for the rest of her political career – Finchley!” (Container)

Now that America’s first black president is serving his second term of office it is hard to realise that half a century ago a humble Afro-American seamstress in the south of the country made history by refusing to give up her seat to a white man in a segregated bus. By so doing she started a revolution. This month we salute brave Rosa Parks.
Many of this month’s picks focus on people who have bettered the lives of others – such as Charles Dickens in highlighting the horrors of London workhouses, who earned their living by serving others such as the domestic servants featured here, or who lived life on the margins.

Lord of the isle : the extravagant life and times of Colin Tennant / Nicholas Courtney.
“This is the biography of the late Lord Glenconner, the lord born to a rich Victorian industrial family who used his wealth to live an eccentric lifestyle of self-indulgence from the 1940s to his death in 2010.”(www.globalbooksinprint.com)

Drinking with men / Rosie Schaap.
“Drinking memoirs generally fall into two categories: Never again and Pour me another. Schaap, who writes the Drink column for the New York Times Magazine, has composed one of the latter, an ode to the great tradition of regularhood advocating equal regularhood rights for women. From her teenage discovery of the bar car on the Metro-North New Haven Line; to her college years at the Pig, in North Bennington, Vermont; to a marriage-ending epiphany at Else’s, in Montreal, Schaap charts her path from adolescence to adulthood, bar by bar, sometimes having a few too many but always finding the sense of community and belonging she clearly craves.”(Provided by publisher).

Dickens and the workhouse : Oliver Twist and the London poor / Ruth Richardson.
“Medical historian Richardson (The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy) joined the cause to preserve a London building that had once been the Strand Union Workhouse (as the British say) Cleveland Street. She made what she calls “the remarkable finding” that Dickens lived only a few doors away as a toddler and again in his late teens. Never mind that Dickens’s London addresses have long been known and that he placed the Oliver Twist workhouse 75 miles north of London (an area he visited where there was a workhouse)-Richardson wants to make the case for this workhouse as the basis for the famous workhouse scenes in Oliver Twist. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.” (Library Journal)

The rebellious life of Mrs. Rosa Parks / Jeanne Theoharis.
“In her introduction to this biography, Brooklyn College political scientist Theoharis (coauthor of Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside of the South) notes the common perception of Rosa Parks (1913-2005): “hidden in plain sight, celebrated and paradoxically relegated to be a hero for children.” Into that gap, Theoharis submits a lavishly well-documented study of Parks’s life and career as an activist. In tracing her work with the Montgomery NAACP and other groups from the 1930s onwards, and then following her move from Alabama after the 1956 bus boycott to Detroit, Theoharis maps a lifetime devoted to civil rights, thereby destabilizing our notions of Parks as a “tired seamstress” who simply kept her seat on a bus one day in 1955.(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved” (Publisher Weekly).

Outsiders : stories from the fringe of New Zealand society / Gerard Hindmarsh.
“A social history of New Zealand’s outsiders, such as Arawata Bill, The Chaffeys, George Wilder and others – those who choose to live out on the fringes of society, and whose free and unrestricted lives offer an important counterbalance to the structured urban world most of us inhabit”.(Syndetics summary).

The real Jane Austen : a life in small things / Paula Byrne.
“Just in time for the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (first published in January 1813), comes Paula Byrne’s vivacious new portrait of its author. The approach Byrne (Jane Austen and the Theatre) takes is refreshingly material-based and the book is experimental in structure; each chapter unfolds from the biographer’s description of a small object associated with Austen’s life (chapter titles include “The East Indian Shawl”, “The Cocked Hat” “The Card of Lace”, “The Crimson Velvet Cushions”, and “The Topaz Crosses”). This technique serves two functions: firstly, it honors the precision for which Austen was famed by drawing attention to the material artifacts of her life; secondly, it challenges the “`official’ family biography”". (Publisher Weekly).

Rose : my life in service to Lady Astor / Rosina Harrison.
“Provides the author’s account of working as the personal maid for the American-born Lady Astor.”In 1928, Rosina Harrison arrived at the illustrious household of the Astor family to take up her new position as personal maid to the infamously unconventional Lady Astor, who sat in Parliament, entertained royalty, and traveled the world. Here, in Rose: My Life in Service to Lady Astor, Harrison shares with listeners her fascinating story.”(Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com)

Climbing the stairs / Margaret Powell.
“Margaret Powell was born in 1907 in Hove, and left school at the age of 13 to start working. At 14, she got a job in a hotel laundry room, and a year later went into service as a kitchen maid, eventually progressing to the position of cook, before marrying a milkman called Albert. In 1968 the first volume of her memoirs, Below Stairs, was published to instant success and turned her into a celebrity. She followed this up with Climbing the Stairs, The Treasure Upstairs and The Margaret Powell Cookery Book. She died in 1984.”(Summary from www/globalbooksinprint.com).

Literary outlaw : the life and times of William S. Burroughs / Ted Morgan.
“Another dazzling literary portrait from the author of Maugham [BKL F 15 80]. This time Morgan has chosen a subject whose life and work are so inextricable that, unlike the effort required to unravel Maugham’s attempts to disguise his real nature, what is required here is a candor and openness to match the subject’s notoriety and vulnerability. A homosexual and drug addict, Burroughs pursued an individual course in his life and art with a purpose and intensity that would set him apart from other members of the countercultural circle that he helped make famous– let alone from more orthodox intellectual and artistic circles.Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.” (Booklist).

On Helwig Street : a memoir / Richard Russo.
“In its heyday Gloversville, New York was a prosperous beacon of the leather-goods industry, famously producing nine out of ten pairs of American gloves. But by the time Richard Russo was growing up there in the 1950s, the only son of a largely absent father and a mother, Jean, who suffered from ‘nerves’, Gloversville had fallen victim to changing fashions and gone bust. A better life elsewhere was the dream Jean instilled in her son and strived to secure for them both. Vividly recalling the road trips and adventures that took them far from Gloversville but always led them back home, Russo describes how childhood segued into adulthood and parenthood in the company of his restless mother. At the same time he recounts with touching honesty how the literary success that enriched his own life was at odds with the disappointment that punctuated hers.” (Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

ALSO RELEVANT

Mrs Woolf and the servants / Alison Light.
“An authoritative, detailed account of the dynamic relationship between Virginia Woolf and the domestic help that was so crucial to her existence as a woman and a writer. Alison Light is clear-eyed and wise about her chosen topic. She has not only done her research, but brings to her task some unique advantages: Her grandmother was in domestic service. And indeed a particular feature of “Mrs. Woolf and the Servants” is its emphasis on the humanity of these women. Although well-versed in and informed by the sociological background, Ms. Light is careful to present rounded portraits of these people who played such an important role in the Woolf household.” —Washington Times

AND A GOOD ONE YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

What the grown-ups were doing : an odyssey through 1950s suburbia / Michele Hanson.
“Michele Hanson grew up an ‘oddball tomboy disappointment’ in a Jewish family in Ruislip in the 1950s – a suburban, Metroland idyll of neat lawns, bridge parties and Martini socials. This hilarious and wonderfully evocative memoir charts Michele’s childhood and coming of age in a Britain that was emerging from post-war austerity.”(Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

At a Gala Awards Presentation on the 28th February, Dame Anne Salmond was honoured as the 2013 New Zealander of the Year. This award is for a New Zealander who has made, according to the organisers of the award, “a significant contribution to our nation and makes us proud of our country and what can be achieved”. This year’s recipient is a well known author and we have in our collection her eight award winning books on the topics of Māori life and early contacts between Europeans and islanders in Polynesia. Anne Salmond is an eminent historian, writer and academic. She worked closely with Eruera and Amiria Stirling, Te Whaanau-a-Apanui and Ngati Porou elders, and this collaboration led to her first three books. Here are her books in reverse chronological order.

Bligh : William Bligh in the South Seas / Anne Salmond.
“Aphrodite’s Island is a bold new account of the European discovery of Tahiti, the Pacific island of mythic status in Western imaginings about sexuality, the exotic, and the nobility or bestiality of ’savages’. In this groundbreaking book, Anne Salmond takes readers to the centre of these societies’ shared history to furnish rich insights into Tahitian perceptions of the visitors while illuminating the full extent of European fascination with Tahiti. As she discerns the impact and meaning of the European effect on the island, she demonstrates how, during the early contact period, the mythologies of Europe and Tahiti intersected and became entwined.Drawing on Tahitian oral histories, European manuscripts and artworks, and collections of Tahitian artifacts, and illustrated with sketches, paintings, and engravings from the voyages, Aphrodite’s Island provides a vivid account of the Europeans’ Tahitian adventures. The book’s many compelling insights into Tahitian life will significantly change the way we view the history of this small island during a period when it became a crossroads for Europe.” (Syndetics summary)

The trial of the cannibal dog : Captain Cook in the South Seas / Anne Salmond.
“The Pacific voyages of James Cook sailed across perilous tropical seas, survived hurricanes and volcanic eruptions, discovered unknown lands and peoples and made their Captain an icon of imperial history.” “Yet, as Anne Salmond shows, the story of these epic South Sea journeys is far more than one of conquest and control. She has devoted a lifetime to the study of relations between Europeans and Polynesians, and this startling, rich, stylish book is the result. In Salmond’s account, Cook’s great voyages regain their dreamlike quality as they encounter the last major human communities untouched by wider worlds. Far from being little wooden islands of Englishness in a Polynesian sea, his ships and the men in them are as much changed by what happens as the islanders they meet. We see them alarmed and entranced by the islanders’ open sexuality, shocked by human sacrifice and cannibalism, but also forging relationships with Pacific Island friends and lovers, acquiring tattoos and learning to speak Polynesian languages, with Cook himself granted the status of high chief in many areas before his violent downfall.” (Book Jacket)

Between worlds : early exchanges between Maori and Europeans, 1773-1815 / Anne Salmond.
“This book follows on from ‘Two Worlds’ which covered the period from Abel Tasman’s visit to Cook’s in 1772, and explores the time from Cook’s second visit to the establishment of the first missionary settlement. It is in three parts: science and whakapapa; utu, law and commerce; and tapu and religion. It is illustrated with black and white images and maps, and includes an appendix detailing the many visits by European ships during the period.” (Syndetics summary)

Two worlds : first meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642-1772 / Anne Salmond.
“This book is a provocative synthesis of two previously seperate views of the dramatic action-packed first meetings of Māori and Europeans in New Zealand. The result is a work of trail blazing significance in which many popular misconceptions and bigotries to do with common perceptions of traditional Māori society are revealed. It also opens up new possibilities in the international study of European exploration and ‘discovery’.” (Adapted from front cover)

Eruera, the teachings of a Maori elder / Eruera Stirling as told to Anne Salmond.
“The book is concerned to preserve the traditional knowledge Eruera Stirling had himself received from tribal elders. There is an outline tribal history, and an account of life in his youth. Concepts such as mana, matauranga and whakapapa are discussed, as well as recent important events in New Zealand race relations. The book won the Wattie Book Award in 1981. ‘Two Worlds’, Anne Salmond’s most recent book, won a Wattie Award and the New Zealand Book Award for non-fiction in 1991.” (Syndetics summary)

Amiria : the life story of a Maori woman / Amiria Manutahi Stirling ; as told to Anne Salmond.
“Amiria Manutahi Stirling was born at Taumata-o-mihi, a small settlement near Ruatoria on the East Coast. She was a member of the Ngāti Hinekehu sub-tribe of Ngāti Porou. In 1918 her elders arranged her marriage to Eruera Stirling of Te Whānau-ā-Maru in the Bay of Plenty, a match aimed at strengthening traditional links between two groups. The story of her life and marriage is told in this book.” (Adapted from back cover)

Hui : a study of Maori ceremonial gatherings / Anne Salmond.
“This book introduces us to all aspects of the hui and its significance for the Māori. It is a definitive study of ceremonial gatherings and the riruals that are the life blood of the marae. She presents a comprehensive account of Māori ceremonial gatherings for the formal student of ethnology and anthropology and provides absorbing reading for the lay person, Māori and Pākehā, with an interest in Māoritanga.” (Adapted from front cover)

Scarlett O’Hara is probably one of the best -known heroines in modern fiction.What is less well-known is that the author’s life was almost as tumultuous as that of her fictional creation.. Mitchell’s life mirrored Scarlett’s in that she rejected a conventional suitor and chose a wild outsider instead. But unlike Scarlett she was given a second chance, and that union gave birth to ‘Gone with the wind’.
Two other books selected this month feature second chances. Many will have seen the moving French film ” The Intouchables“.- ‘A second wind’ is the true story behind it. Phillipe Pozzi de Borgo was a wealthy champagne magnate who became a quadraplegic after a hang-gliding accident. Abdel was the tough, streetwise Algerian immigrant who reluctantly became his carer. His bucaneering approach to life gave fun and freedom to Philippe and ultimately helped him to find his life partner. In a neat juxtaposition looking after Philippe led to a new life for Abdel.
Award-winning writer Elie Weisel was given the gift of a new life after heart surgery. In “Open heart’ he reflects on his life – his successes and dispappointments and his hope that he had made the world a better place.

Wives and stunners : the Pre-Raphaelites and their muses / Henrietta Garnett.
“Essentially a domestic biography whose main concern is the tragicomedy of manners enacted by a closely knit group of friends and lovers,’ Wives and Stunners’ tells the story of Janey Morris, Georgie Burne-Jones, Lizzie Siddall, Effie Gray and–less well-known–Marie Spartali, Aglaia Coronio and Mary Zambacco.” (Syndetics summary).

Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh : the love story behind Gone with the wind / a biography by Marianne Walker.
“Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), author of Gone With the Wind , jilted her kind, protective suitor, John Marsh, and instead married Red Upshaw, an unstable bootlegger who physically abused her. Even after she divorced Upshaw, Mitchell, according to Walker, was a confused romantic who in many ways resembled her heroine, Scarlett O’Hara. A “classic demanding-dependent personality,” Mitchell found more than a supportive fatherly mate in public relations executive Marsh, whom she finally married in 1925. Walker, a professor of English and philosophy at the University of Kentucky-Henderson Community College, reveals that Marsh played a vital role in the creation of Mitchell’s classic Civil War saga. He offered key ideas and advice, continuously edited the manuscript as his wife wrote it, and helped with the revision. Walker quotes liberally from the couple’s letters and also draws on interviews, family papers and archival research to tell a moving love story of a symbiotic union that lasted 24 years. A remarkable piece of detective work.” (Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

Beryl Bainbridge : artist, writer, friend / Psiche Hughes.
“This book is a highly personal, chronological account of Beryls life and work both her writing and her painting and provides a vivid first-hand portrait of this free-spirited and uniquely talented woman. Beryl Bainbridge is best known as a prolific writer of novels that ranged from black comedies of contemporary life, often autobiographical in inspiration, to idiosyncratic reimaginings of historical events and characters. Less well known is that painting and drawing were also lifelong passions, and a source of income too in the days before her success as a writer. Most of all she painted people friends, lovers, her children, invented characters, characters from her novels, or historical figures (she had a particular fascination for Napoleon). She had no formal training, but developed an exuberance of technique to match her imagination.” (Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

A second wind / Philippe Pozzo di Borgo ; translated by Will Hobson.
“Philippe Pozzo di Borgo was not in the habit of asking for help. Then, in 1993, a paragliding accident left him a quadriplegic. The only person who wasn’t bothered by Philippe’s condition was Abdel, the unemployed Algerian immigrant from the outskirts of society who would become Philippe’s unlikely caretaker.”(Syndetics summary).

“The summer my father died / Yudit Kiss ; translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes.
“This is a warm, graceful and poignant account of a daughter’s journey to understand her father, as well as the generation that grew up in socialist Hungary.”(Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

Open heart / Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel.
“A profoundly and unexpectedly intimate, deeply affecting summing up of his life so far, from one of the most cherished moral voices of our time. Eighty-two years old, facing emergency heart surgery and his own mortality, Elie Wiesel reflects back on his life. Emotions, images, faces and questions flash through his mind. His family before and during the unspeakable Event. The gifts of marriage and children and grandchildren that followed. In his writing, in his teaching, in his public life, has he done enough for memory and the survivors? His ongoing questioning of God—where has it led? Is there hope for mankind? The world’s tireless ambassador of tolerance and justice has given us this luminous account of hope and despair, an exploration of the love, regrets and abiding faith of a remarkable.”(Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

William Colenso : printer, missionary, botanist, explorer, politician : his life and journeys / by A.G. Bagnall and G.C. Petersen ; [edited by Ian St George].
“Colenso, a Church Missionary Society missionary, printer and botanist, established the first printing press in New Zealand and printed the first book, 5000 copies of the New Testament in Māori, in 1837. He also printed the Treaty of Waitangi. His Authentic and genuine history of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1890) is regarded as the most reliable European account from the time. Throughout his life, he defended the rights and equality of Māori. Posted to Hawke’s Bay and determined to expand the activities of the mission, Colenso undertook major journeys to reach isolated Māori villages on the east coast of the North Island and inland.” (Syndetics summary).

Nancy : the story of Lady Astor / Adrian Fort.
“In 1919, Nancy Astor became the first female MP elected to the House of Commons. She was not what had been expected – or rather, in some quarters, feared. Far from a virago who had suffered for the cause of female suffrage, Nancy Astor was already near the centre of the ruling society that had for so long resisted the political upheavals of the early twentieth century, having married into the family of one of the richest men in the world. She wasn’t even British, but the daughter of a famous Virginian family, and fiercely proud of her expatriate ancestry. But her moral drive was strong, and she would utilise her position of extraordinary privilege and influence to blow a bracing American wind into what she regarded as the stuffy corners of British politics”(Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

Moranthology / Caitlin Moran.
“British journalist Moran’s (How To Be a Woman) award-winning columns for The Times are available here for an American audience for the first time. In the introduction, she declares her intentions to write “a collection of instances of how brilliant the world often is.” To that end, she covers topics that range from her personal history (being homeschooled in a housing project in the industrial city of Wolverhampton, her work interviewing musicians including Keith Richards and Lady Gaga), social issues (benefit reform, the welfare state, the importance of libraries, particularly to poor communities; she describes them as places “where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary”. (Summary from www.globalbooksinnprint.com).

The pinecone : the story of Sarah Losh, forgotten romantic heroine, antiquarian, architect and visionary / Jenny Uglow.
“*Starred Review* Uglow takes such delight in her work that every page shimmers and whirls. On a mission to rescue neglected, radical English artists, such as Thomas Bewick (Nature’s Engraver, 2007), she now richly and inquisitively portrays brainy and independent Sarah Losh (1786-1853). Uglow grew up in Cumbria, Losh’s home territory, and knows well the wildly unconventional church Losh designed and built in the village of Wreay, a house of worship brimming with imagery drawn from Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, all shaped by Losh’s passion for fossils and science. Losh even helped craft the carved stone and wood vines, lotus flowers, dragon, butterflies*(–Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist.From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission).(Syndetics summary)

Colette is hailed as the most accomplished French female writer and her life was as tempestuous as some of her novels. Married three times, she had numerous affairs and shocked many of her contemporaries in the Paris of “La Belle Epoque”.
You can find out more about Sidonie Gabrielle Colette in the books and links below. We’ve also added links to her works on the library catalogue. Have a browse!

Books

Secrets of the flesh : a life of Colette.
“Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was this century’s first modern woman. She arrived in Paris around 1900 as the provincial child bride of a notorious rake and brilliant literary impressario, Willy, who signed her first novels, the Claudines, as his own. They invented the erotically reckless teenage girl as we know her, and became the greatest French bestsellers of all time. When this tumultuous marriage ended, Colette went off with a high-born woman lover, the virile Marquise de Belboeuf, and embarked on a flamboyant stage career. She bared her breast to raucous applause in the French music-hall and became a celebrity of the lesbian demimonde. Until her death in 1954, she continued to rewrite the rules for loving, working, and aging. At the end of the century, her life and work still have the power to challenge the norms.” (Amazon.co.uk summary)

Looking backwards / Colette ; translated from the French by David Le Vay, with an introd. by Maurice Goudeket.
“These observations of war-time Paris, mingles with reminiscences of childhood scenes and customs, were first published in 1942, as De ma fenetre. Written with Colette’s usual keen sensitivity and humour, they show how closely she identified with ordinary people, especially children at this time”. (excerpt from book jacket)

Colette, a passion for life / Genevieve Dormann.
“A biography of the celebrated French writer offers a collection of anecdotes, previously unpublished correspondence and photographs, in an account of the woman, the author, and her work.” (Amazon.co.uk summary)

Links:

• Colette on the Encyclopedia of World Biography
• Colette on Wikipedia
• Colette on Encyclopædia Britannica Online

Her works:

Claudine at school / Colette ; translated by Antonia White.
“Claudine is a head strong, clever and extremely mischievous schoolgirl. Along with her friends the lanky Anais, the cheerful Marie and the prim Joubert twins Claudine wreaks havoc on her small school. Always clever, witty and charming Claudine is more than a match for her formidable headmistress as they fight for the attention of the pretty assistant Aimee. The horrors of examinations and good-humoured bullying are the backdrops in this immensely funny and delightful novel with which Colette established the captivating character of Claudine. Through the games, the fun and the intricacies of school life Claudine emerges as a true original; lyrical and intelligent she is one of the twentieth century’s most beguiling emancipated women” (Amazon.co.uk summary)

My mother’s house, and, Sido/ Colette.
“Two works about the author’s childhood and family reflect the influential role of her mother in her character development and life.” (Amazon.co.uk summary)

The ripening seed/ Colette.
“The author captures that precious, painful moment when childhood retreats at the onslaught of dawning knowledge and desire. Philippe and Venca are childhood friends. In the days and nights of late summer on the Brittany coast, their deep-rooted love for each other loses its childhood simplicity.” (Amazon.co.uk summary)

Chéri [videorecording] / Miramax Films presents in association with Pathé, UK Film Council, Aramid Entertainment with the participation of MMC Studios, Filmstiftung NRW, DFFF, Tiggy Films and Reliant Pictures Corporation ; a Bill Kenwright production ; a film by Stephen Frears.
“The story of the love affair between a beautiful retired courtesan Lea, and Chéri, the son of her old colleague and rival, Madame Peloux. After six years Madame Peloux has secretly arranged a marriage between Chéri and Edmee, the daughter of another rich courtesan. As the inevitable moment of parting approaches, Lea and Cheri begin to understand, too late, how much they mean to one another”–Container.

Gigi [videorecording] / MGM presents an Arthur Freed production ; directed by Vincente Minnelli.
“A home, a motorcar, servants, the latest fashions: the most eligible and most finicky bachelor in Paris offers them all to Gigi. But she, who’s gone from girlish gawkishness to cultured glamour before our eyes, yearns for that wonderful something money can’t buy”–Container.

Happy New Year to biography-lovers everywhere !! We have a great crop of new books for your delight and delectation, including a lovely new memoir by Grace Coddington of The September Issue fame. We have also received important new works on Stamford Raffles of Singapore, Robespierre, the love life of Charles Dickens and a book about Louisa May Alcott which focuses on her relationship with her very remarkable mother.
‘Meme : the three worlds of a Chinese – Italian New Zealander” is a book with local appeal. We quickly forget what our country was like in the 1950s – Meme Churton was a woman who brought sophistication and charm to our rather provincial lives. Something for everyone!! Happy reading.

Grace : a memoir / Grace Coddington with Michael Roberts.
“Coddington, creative director of the American Vogue magazine, has much to impart (which she has done before in Grace: 30 Years of Fashion at Vogue, 2002, and The Catwalk Cats, 2008). Fashionistas, rejoice, because not only does she chronicle the life and times of a former model turned editor; she also discusses those whose names appear in any celebrity column photographers such as Annie Leibovitz and Bruce Weber, models like Naomi Campbell, and the Calvin Klein and French couture maitres. What saves this from becoming a download of the activities of the rich and famous is, first, her amazing candor”.(Booklist).

Charles Dickens in love / Robert Garnett.
“*Starred Review* Four graves mark the conclusion of Garnett’s probing bioliterary study: the famous tomb of Charles Dickens’ in Westminster Abbey and the largely forgotten graves of three women who forever left their mark on Dickens’ books. The influence of these women indeed validates the judgment of an American visitor to the author: A man must have really loved a woman if he would fully interpret the secrets of a woman’s heart. The first of the women Dickens really loved, Maria Beadnell, spurned Dickens’ youthful advances yet impressed upon his imagination the lineaments of Estella in Great Expectations. The second female inspiration in Dickens’ life, Mary Hogarth Dickens’ sister-in-law died young, in Dickens’ arms. Her saintly image shines forth in Agnes in David Copperfield. But Garnett devotes his most sustained inquiry to the love” (Booklist).

The watchmaker’s daughter / Sonia Taitz.
“From the time Taitz was small, her parents’ stories about the Holocaust were like telling me about the secrets of the cosmos. Parts of this refugee family’s dynamics were competitions about which parent’s family had suffered most my life was worse than yours . . . you don’t know from suffering and, more happily, affection. When Sonia’s adored father pulled her toward him, my joy was boundless I had been – selected.’ Only then, chosen, did I feel fully alive. Her Jewish home, where even the walls were sighing, makes her eager for an outside world and education. She realizes, however, that her promised land is not Yale Law School, and finally becomes her own true self while studying literature at Oxford”.(Booklist)

Raffles and the golden opportunity 1781-1826 / Victoria Glendinning.
“This is the first biography in decades of the ‘Father of Singapore’. Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the charismatic and persuasive founder of Singapore and Governor of Java. An English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, zoologist and civil servant, he carved an extraordinary (though brief) life for himself in South East Asia. The tropical, disease-ridden settings of his story are as dramatic as his own trajectory – an obscure young man with no advantages other than talent and obsessive drive, who changed history by establishing – without authority – on the wretchedly unpromising island of Singapore, a settlement which has become a world city”.(Wellington City Libraries’ catalogue note).

Robespierre : a revolutionary life / Peter McPhee.
“Historian and professor McPhee (Living the French Revolution, 1789-1799) adds to his volumes on French history with a comprehensive biography of the controversial, diminutive, outspoken, and ambitious man who overcame adversity to become a lawyer, who argued for the rights of children born out of wedlock and freedom of the press in 18th-century France, and whose name is inextricably linked with the French Revolution-for better or worse. McPhee maintains that Maximilien Robespierre “was seeking to make sense of the chaos of a world in revolutionary upheaval and to use his talents to create stability and certainty for a new order”-but at the end of his short life, he was “reviled as thoroughly as he had once been idolized.” (Book jacket).

The road from Morocco : a memoir / Wafa Faith Hallam.
“The true story of Saadia, a thirteen-year-old Arab girl wed against her will in a Morocco divided between French and Arab traditional cultures. Her struggle to win a divorce and pursue her independence paves the way for her children to leave for America. Wafa, her oldest daughter, thrives in male-dominated Wall Street until she discovers the land of freedom and opportunity does not shield them from a tragic destiny. A string of events, including a violent marriage, mental illness, the 9/11 terrorist attack, and the Iraq war, conspire to bring about Wafa’s emotional breakdown followed by the end of her career. At last, the redemptive power of a newfound spirituality transforms Wafa’s life as seen in this literary memoir that reads like a compelling novel”.(Wellington City Libraries catalogue note).

Memé : the three worlds of an Italian-Chinese New Zealander / Memé Churton.
“Memé is half-Italian and half-Chinese and this unusual combination has coloured her personality and the course of her life. Growing up in Italy, she lived through the rise of Fascism and the Second World War. Next she went to China and found herself in the midst of the Chinese Revolution. Then she travelled to the other side of the world at the invitation of a New Zealand soldier whom she had met at the end of the war. Memé was shocked by the curiously old-fashioned and provincial way of life she found in 1950s New Zealand, but for various reasons she stayed, got married, and became involved in a variety of campaigns to enlarge its culture. She managed one of the first dealer art galleries, started one of its first European-style coffee bars, championed international cuisine, promoted fashion for women.”(Publisher Weekly).

Marmee & Louisa : the untold story of Louisa May Alcott and her mother / Eve LaPlante.
“*Starred Review* It’s not unusual for a biography to include a family tree, but it’s rare for the biographer to appear on it. LaPlante (Salem Witch Judge, 2007) is great-niece and cousin of the subjects of this involving mother-daughter portrait of Abigail May and Louisa May Alcott. Louisa’s unconventional father, Bronson, has received far more attention than his long-suffering, feminist wife, even though Abigail is the model for Marmee, the beloved mother in Little Women. This imbalance was due, in part, to Bronson’s burning of Abigail’s personal papers. But LaPlante discovered that all was not lost while examining the contents of her mother’s attic. Her subsequent quest for more overlooked materials resulted in this first full biography of Abigail; a collection of her writings (My Heart Is Boundless) and a fresh perspective on Louisa”.(Booklist).

An extraordinary theory of objects : a memoir of an outsider in Paris / Stephanie LaCava ; with illustrations by Matthew Nelson.
“Fashion writer Lavaca’s childhood and teenage years were strange and confounding. The author’s family moved from New York to a Parisian suburb in 1993 when she was 12; the next year she suffered a breakdown. Always considered a bit strange as a child, she found solace and a sense of order in collecting objects. She had a passion for ancient mythologies: “I was obsessed with cabinets of curiosities, historical efforts to catalog and control nature’s oddities,” Lacava writes. As an adult Lacava began looking back over her life “through a narrative illuminated with objects and their respective stories.”(Publisher Weekly).

Life is a gift : the zen of Bennett / Tony Bennett ; foreword by Mitch Albom.
“Relaxed and comfortable but full of vigor, Bennett’s voice has charmed audiences for more than 60 years. Writing in the same style as he sings, in this new work he shares meditative lessons culled from his amazing life. Having learned the value of hard work during the Great Depression, the pointlessness of war during WWII, and the importance of being true to yourself during a career that has seen musical fads come and go over and over, Bennett (The Good Life, with Will Friedwald) has developed a loose set of rules by which he lives. Whether he is suggesting people “Only Sing Good Songs” or “Everything Should be Done with Love,” Bennett explains how these tenets have shaped his success and makes suggestions about how others can apply them to their lives”. (Publisher Weekly).

The varnished untruth : my story / Pamela Stephenson.
“This is the autobiography of Pamela Stephenson, the wife of Billy Connelly and renowned writer and actress in her own right.”I am darn good at getting under other people’s skin, but opening up about my own life is quite a different matter. So how shall I portray myself? There are choices, you know: Wife, mother, psychologist, writer, comedian, actor, dancer, diver, gypsy, dreamer, rich girl, poor girl, beggar girl, thief. I am all of those and more. Tell you what, you decide. You decide exactly what I am.” A complicated childhood in Australia, a bold move to London, being a woman in a man’s world on Not the Nine O’Clock News, becoming Mrs Billy Connolly, motherhood, career changes and then Strictly Come Dancing – told in her own inimitable style”.(Wellington City Libraries catalogue note).

The phrase ” good British biography’ has a certain resonance and most biography-lovers will know what it means. This month’s subjects are all well-known English figures – most of historic importance – and they have been researched and written up by experts in the field or established scribes. Of particular interest is a new study of John Keats – the author was recently the guest-speaker at a seminar on the English Romantic poets at Victoria University and gave a public lecture and newspaper and radio interviews on his subject. We also feature a new work on the Bronte sisters, on Darwin – and Artemis Cooper’s new book on the writer and explorer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Look at the many great books on offer this month and take your pick!!

John Keats : a new life / Nicholas Roe.
“This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium. Through unparalleled original research, Roe arrives at a fascinating reassessment of Keats’s entire life.” (Summary by www.globalbooksinprint.com).

The Brontës / Juliet Barker.
“The story of the tragic Brontë family is familiar to everyone: we all know about the half-mad, repressive father, the drunken, drug-addled wastrel of a brother, wildly romantic Emily, unrequited Anne, and “poor Charlotte.” Or do we? These stereotypes of the popular imagination are precisely that – imaginary – created by amateur biographers such as Mrs. Gaskell who were primarily novelists and were attracted by the tale of an apparently doomed family of genius.(Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

Patrick Leigh Fermor : an adventure / Artemis Cooper.
“Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely acclaimed as the greatest travel writer of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe.” (Syndetics summary).

Is it just me? / Miranda Hart.
“In ‘Is it Just Me?’, Britain’s best loved comedienne, Miranda Hart, laments on the horrors of growing up and offers her younger self some essential advice on grappling with life’s unexpected perils and blunders”.(Syndetics summary).

The Redgraves : a family epic / Donald Spoto.
“An account of five generations of the Redgrave family traces their achievements and personal lives while offering new revelations based on the author’s insider access as a personal friend of the late Michael Redgrave”.(Syndetics summary).

Darwin : portrait of a genius / Paul Johnson.
“Darwin’s revolutionary career is the perfect vehicle for historian Paul Johnson. Marked by the insightful observation, spectacular wit, and highly readable prose for which Johnson is so well regarded, Darwin brings the gentleman-scientist and his times brilliantly into focus. From Darwin’s birth into great fortune to his voyage aboard the Beagle, to the long-delayed publication of his masterpiece, Johnson delves into what made this Victorian gentleman into a visionary scientist and into the tragic flaws that later led Darwin to support the burgeoning eugenics movement”.(Syndetics summary).

Counting one’s blessings : selected letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother / edited and with a preface by William Shawcross.
“One of the revelations of William Shawcross’s official biography of the Queen Mother was her private correspondence. Indeed the Sunday Times described her letters as ‘wonderful … brimful of liveliness and irreverence, steeliness and sweetness.Queen Elizabeth was a prolific correspondent from her earliest childhood and her letters offer readers a vivid insight into the person behind the public face. They reveal – in her own words – the little girl writing to her family; the young woman who, eventually, accepted Prince Albert’s proposal; the Duchess of York, embracing the public role demanded of her, on royal tours both at home and abroad.”(Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

Mortality / Christopher Hitchens.
“On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported “from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.” Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis. Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open”. (Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

Edmund Spenser : a life / Andrew Hadfield.
“Edmund Spenser’s innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England’s ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx’s words, ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’– a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great?” (Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

AND ONE FROM IRELAND

Country girl / Edna O’Brien.
“Edna O’Brien’s family encouraged her to attend pharmacy school, but she left before finishing to marry an older writer, give birth to two sons, and publish, in 1960, her first novel.The Country Girlsso scandalized the O’Briens’ local parish that the book was burned by the priest, her family disgraced. COUNTRY GIRL comes twenty-one books later, a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that imprint upon and enliven one lifetime.” (Summary from www. globalbooksinprint.com).

ALSO RECEIVED THIS MONTH :

• After Everest: inside the private world of Edmund Hillary/ Paul Little with Carolyne Meng-Yee
• A wife on Gorge River/ Catherine Stewart
• Air kiss & tell : memoirs of a blow-up doll / Charlotte Dawson with Jo Thornely
• Margaret Mahy : a writer’s life / by Tessa Duder
• This way of life / Sumner Burstyn ; photography by Thomas Burstyn and Norbert Guenther.

Borrowers are often foxed by the “BC” label. It refers to collected biographies – i.e. biographies about more than one person. They are filed by the name of the author – for instance ‘The six wives of Henry VIII” by Margaret Weir is designated BC WEI.
Another matter which perplexes patrons is their geographical location. They are situated at the back of the left side wall of the biography section near the big window.
There is a lot of good reading in this often neglected section. A current display in the area features a number of interesting items and we have selected a few for your delectation here.

A fine romance : 75 years of royal weddings / edited by Lisette du Plessis.“More than just a celebration of the marriage of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, A Fine Romance is a sumptuous photographic record of European royal weddings over the last 75 years. These are the unforgettable alliances and love stories that have defined our understanding of modern European royalty. Part one of A Fine Romance is an extraordinarily comprehensive record of historical royal weddings, fairytale brides and handsome princes, from a glamorous and serene Grace Kelly to a blushing and shy Lady Diana Spencer. Part two is a richly illustrated romantic delight, bringing together a stunning collection of images from the marriage of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.”(Summary from www.amazon.co.uk).

A winter on the Nile / Anthony Sattin.“In the winter of 1849, Florence Nightingale was an unknown 29-year-old – beautiful, well-born and deeply unhappy. After clashing with her parents over her refusal to marry, she had been offered a lifeline by family friends who suggested a trip to Egypt, a country which she had always longed to visit. By an extraordinary coincidence, taking the same boat from Alexandria was an unpublished French writer, Gustave Flaubert. Like Nightingale, he was at the crossroads in his life that was to lead to future acclaim and literary triumph. Egypt for him represented escape and freedom as well as inspiration.But as a wealthy young man travelling with male friends, he had access to an altogether different Egpyt: where Nightingale sought out temples and dispensaries, Flaubert visited brothels and harems.”(Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

Absolute power : the real lives of Europe’s most infamous rulers / C.S. Denton.Synopsis :”Here, 75 succinct essays cover European royalty from the last king of Rome to Tsar Nicholas II. There is an enduring public interest in royalty and dictatorial rulers: this book covers all of them comprehensively. Far more than just sensational accounts, the book makes a genuine attempt to understand what drove them to their excesses. An informal, readable style produces a strong turn-page effect. In our time, when European monarchies seem little more than tourist curiosities and democracy is taken for granted, it is easy to forget how much power pre-democratic rulers could once wield. The rulers and holders of political power in this book fall into four categories: those villainized by propaganda; those with serious mental disorders; those simultaneously revered and reviled; and those who truly were the epitome of evil. “Absolute Power” shows how they were all carried away by their exalted status or even overwhelmed by it, while a few were driven over the edge into madness.” (Summary from www.amazon.co.uk).

Kiyo’s story : a Japanese-American family’s quest for the American dream / Kiyo Sato.
“One immigrant family’s touching story of survival and success.” (Syndetics summary).When her father left Japan, his mother told him never to return: there was no future there for him. Shinji Sato arrived in California determined to plant his roots in the Land of Opportunity even though he could not become a citizen. He and his wife started a farm and worked in the fields together with their nine children. At the outbreak of World War II, when Kiyo, the eldest, was 18, the Satos were ordered to Poston Internment Camp. Though they had lived the US for two decades and their children were citizens, they were suddenly uprooted and imprisoned by the government.”(Summary from www.amazon.co.uk).

Great lives : a century in obituaries / edited by Ian Brunskill.
“This volume gathers together obituaries of over 100 of the 20th- century’s most significant and influential politicians, athletes, musicians, writers, artists, pop stars and military leaders. All written by The Times obituaries editor, Ian Brunskill, the articles are ordered chronologically and illustrated with photographs from the The Times archives. The obituaries provide not only an assessment of a life, but also, in their juxtapositions, an eclectic overview of the past century. Distributed in the US by Trafalgar Square Publishing. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)” (Syndetics summary).

Strange meetings : the poets of the Great War / Harry Ricketts.“Strange Meetings provides a highly original account of the War Poets of 1914-1918, written through a series of actual encounters, or near-encounters, from Siegfried Sassoon’s first, blushing meeting with Rupert Brooke over kidneys and bacon at Eddie Marsh’s breakfasts before the war, through famous moments like Sassoon’s encouragement of Owen when both are in hospital at the same time; on to the poignant meeting between Edward Thomas’s widow and Ivor Gurney in 1932; and the last, strange lunch and ‘longish talk’ of Sassoon and David Jones in 1964, half a century after the great war began.
Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. Ricketts’s unusual approach allows him to follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other’s work and showing how these affected their own poetry.”(Summary from www.amazon.co.uk).

Warriors : extraordinary tales from the battlefield / Max Hastings.“An exhilarating and uplifting account of the lives of sixteen ‘warriors’ from the last three centuries, hand-picked for their bravery or extraordinary military experience by the eminent military historian, author and ex-editor of the Daily Telegraph, Sir Max Hastings.
Over the course of forty years of writing about war, Max Hastings has grown fascinated by outstanding deeds of derring-do on the battlefield (land, sea or air) – and by their practitioners. He takes as his examples sixteen people from different nationalities in modern history – including Napoleon’s ‘blessed fool’ Baron Marcellin de Marbot (the model for Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard); Sir Harry Smith, whose Spanish wife Juana became his military companion on many a campaign in the early 19th-century; Lieutenant John Chard, an unassuming engineer who became the hero of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu wars; and Squadron Leader Guy Gibson, the ‘dam buster’ whose heroism in the skies of World War II earned him the nation’s admiration, but few friends.”(Summary from www.amazon.co.uk)

American writers at home / J.D. McClatchy ; photographs by Erica Lennard.
“American Writers at Home affords an unprecedented opportunity to visit the private homes where our greatest writers crafted their masterpieces. In the process, it opens a window onto the writer’s life that will forever change the way you read. As he wrote Moby-Dick, Herman Melville imagined that his study had become a whaling ship’s cabin. In pencil tracings still visible today, William Faulkner plotted the intricate webs of his fiction on his study walls. In these and myriad other ways, the imaginations of the twenty-one writers profiled in this book transformed their surroundings, even as those surroundings shaped the character and context of their classic works.(Summary from www.globalbooksinprint.com).

Significant sisters : the grassroots of active feminism 1839-1939 / Margaret Forster.
Caroline Norton * Elizabeth Blackwell * Florence Nightingale * Emily Davies * Josephine Butler * Elizabeth Cady Stanton * Margaret Sanger * Emma Goldman.
Significant Sisterstraces the lives of eight women, each of whom pioneered vital changes in the spheres of law, education, the professions, morals or politics: the first woman doctor, the pioneer of birth control, a radical journalist, and suffragists. Each forged her own particular brand of feminism, yet all fought bravely to make real, lasting difference to women’s lives, and make us redefine our own notions of feminism today.”(Summary from www.globalbooksint.com).

Four queens : the Provençal sisters who ruled Europe / Nancy Goldstone.
“Set against the backdrop of the thirteenth century, a time of chivalry and crusades, poetry, knights, and monarchs, comes the story of the four provocative sisters who rose from near obscurity to become the most coveted and powerful women in Europe. The brilliant marriages of Marguerite, Eleanor, Sanchia, and Beatrice, the beautiful daughters of the count of Provence, made them the queens of France, England, Germany, and Sicily.” “From a cultured childhood in enchanting Provence, each sister was propelled into a world marked by shifting alliances, intrigue, and subterfuge.”(BOOK JACKET).

The big news this month is the receipt of Salman Rushdie’s long awaited memoir ‘ Joseph Anton’. The title takes its name from the pen-name he adopted after being sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeni on the publication of The Satanic verses in 1989.The book is a fascinating mix of autobiography, gossip, literary criticism and the reasons for writing and reading. Donna Rifkind (reviewing this book in The New York Times), says:

Read all of “Joseph Anton,” then, for its lessons in how books are used, and whether they matter

For a lighter but by no means lightweight reading experience, try Kaffe Fassett’s Dreaming in colour.  Kaffe is a master of beautiful designs in patchwork, knitting, needlework and mosaics. It is no exaggeration to say that he has revolutionised these crafts and breathed new life into them. He was the first living textile artist to have a one-man exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has also had a most interesting life and tells a very good story. Take your pick of our new offerings. Happy reading!!

Joseph Anton : a memoir / Salman Rushdie.
“The extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov – Joseph Anton.
How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for over nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom.” (Summary from www.amazon.co.uk.)

The House of Hancock : the rise and rise of Gina Rinehart / Debi Marshall.
“Gina Rinehart is the richest woman in the world – but at what cost? From an early age Gina Rinehart knew she was heir to one of Australia’s largest fortunes. Her father, Lang Hancock, loved her dearly and groomed her to take over the company. Then along came Rose, the Filipina housekeeper Lang married in 1985, and the obsessively private House of Hancock was changed forever. Hancock’s death in 1992 opened floodgates of litigation, with Rose and Gina fixtures in the courts fighting it out for their share of Lang’s mining assets. The Pilbara Princess has now become the Queen of Litigation, taking on her children and anyone else who dares to challenge her through countless court battles.” (Summary from www.amazon.co.uk).

The Black Count : glory, revolution, betrayal and the real Count of Monte Cristo / Tom Reiss.
“The inspiration for some of the great adventure tales of Alexandre Dumas has long been a subject of curiosity and debate. According to Reiss, the inspiration for the great novel of intrigue, betrayal, and revenge, The Count of Monte Cristo, was Dumas’ own father, General Alexandre Alex Dumas. In this often thrilling and often sad chronicle, Reiss makes clear that Alex lived a life as full of adventure, triumph, and tragic loss as any of his son’s literary creations.” (Summary from Global Books).

The end of your life book club / Will Schwalbe.
“Mary Anne Schwalbe is waiting for her chemotherapy treatments when Will casually asks her what she’s reading. The conversation they have grows into tradition: soon they are reading the same books so they can have something to talk about in the hospital waiting room. Their choices range from classic (Howards End) to popular (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), from fantastic (The Hobbit) to spiritual (Jon Kabat-Zinn), with many in between. We hear their passion for reading and their love for each other in their intimate and searching discussions. A profoundly moving testament to the power of love between a child and parent, and the power of reading in our lives.” (Summary from www.amazon.co.uk).

My sister Rosalind Franklin / Jenifer Glynn.
“Rosalind Franklin is famous in the history of science for her contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA, the start of the greatest biological revolution of the twentieth century. Much has been written about the importance of her part, and about how her work was affected by her position as a woman scientist. Above all she was a distinguished scientist, not only in her work on DNA, but also in her earlier work on coals and carbons and in her later work on viruses. In this family memoir her sister, the writer and historian Jenifer Glynn, paints a full picture of Rosalind’s life. Looking at Rosalind’s background; her early education, her time as a science student at Cambridge, and her relations with her family, to her life as an adult and her time in Paris and at King’s, Glynn shows how much her sister achieved and how she was influenced by the social and intellectual climate of the period she worked in.”(Summary from Global Books).

Greta Garbo : divine star / David Bret.
“Though there have been numerous biographies of Greta Garbo, this is the first to fully investigate the two so-called missing periods in the life of this most mysterious and enigmatic of all the Hollywood stars. The first, during the late 1920s when Garbo disappeared completely for several months forcing the studio employed a lookalike, was almost certainly to conceal a pregnancy. The second occurred during World War Two, when Garbo was employed by British Intelligence to track down Nazi sympathisers. In Gr eta Garbo : Divi ne Star David Bret has acquired a large amount of previously unsourced material, along with anecdotes from friends and colleagues of the star which have never before been published. For the first time, he paints a complete portrait of her childhood and youth in Sweden. Bret has also sourced copies of all Garbo s films with the exception Th e Divi ne Wom an of whicch no print survives including the silents, before scenes were trimmed or cut. Additionally the author met Garbo in Paris a few years before she died.”  (Summary from Global Books).

Edith Wharton at home : life at The Mount / Richard Guy Wilson ; foreword by Pauline C. Metcalf ; photographs by John Arthur.
“At once a leader and a recorder of the glamorous Gilded Age society, Edith Wharton is at the pinnacle of American literature and social history. The Mount, her summer “cottage” in the Berkshires, was essential to her success, filled with gatherings of literary figures and artists, and this book documents the story of her life there” (Publisher description)

Hitler’s English girlfriend : the story of Unity Mitford / David Rehak.
“‘Hitler’s English girlfriend’ looks at the life of Unity Mitford, a prominent supporter of fascism and who was part of Hitler’s inner circle of friends and confidants for five years.” (Summary from Global Books).

Dreaming in colour : an autobiography / Kaffe Fassett.
“Kaffe Fassett studied painting on scholarship at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but left after less than one year and traveled to England, where he ultimately made his home. After struggling to make a living as a fine artist for several years, Fassett met the fashion designer Bill Gibb and began designing knitwear for his collection. He went on to design knitwear for Missoni and for private clients like Lauren Bacall, Shirley MacLaine, and Barbra Streisand, and to revolutionise the hand knitting world with his explosive use of color. Further explorations led him to needlepoint, mosaics, rug-making, yarn and fabric design, set design and quilting” (Summary from Global Books)

Biography-lovers may also enjoy :
The fishing fleet : husband-hunting in the Raj / Anne de Courcy.
“From the late 19th century, when the Raj was at its height, many of Britain’s best and brightest young men went out to India to work as administrators, soldiers and businessmen. With the advent of steam travel and the opening of the Suez Canal, countless young women, suffering at the lack of eligible men in Britain, followed in their wake. This amorphous band was composed of daughters returning after their English education, girls invited to stay with married sisters or friends, and yet others whose declared or undeclared goal was simply to find a husband. They were known as the Fishing Fleet, and this book is their story, hitherto untold.” (Summary from www.amazon.co.uk).