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[[Category:Autobiography|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Autobiography]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Lena Mukhina and Amanda Love Darragh (translator)
|title=The Diary of Lena Mukhina: A Girl's Life in the Siege of Leningrad
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=If life as a girl of school-leaving age is hard enough, think about it when you're stuck in a great city under a horrendous siege. Lena Mukhina's diary only covers half the 800-odd days the nightmare in Leningrad lasted, but so palpably singular were the circumstances that it feels like one is given the clearest insight into what it was like, courtesy of these pages. I've been there and never felt the ghost of the siege in the modern St Petersburg, anything like (for example) the ruination of Warsaw had lived on. But a dreadful time this was. At the peak times of Nazi oppression and aerial bombing, the city lost 2 or 3 residents' lives ''every minute'' of the day on average. The city was desperate for fuel, and food – and this is a place where it can – and does here – snow in June. Without giving too much of the diet away, it's notable that later on Lena dreams of having a menagerie of small animals to live with – but no dogs or cats.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>144726987X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Margery Kempe and Anthony Bale (editor)
|summary=If you read a broadsheet you will know the format of this book from when it came out in hardback – indeed I recognised a great portion of the third part as having been excerpted somewhere. Part one of this triptych is a look back at pioneering aeronauts in hot air balloons – either ''hydrogen balloons'' or ''flame balloons'', whatever they are. They may have had crash landings, they may have suffered problems here and there and risked life and limb, but they travelled, they saw the world from unique angles, and almost in homage to Barnes' characters chasing the sun in an airplane in his own book, saw themselves as a photographic negative writ large in shadow form on the tops of clouds.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099584530</amazonuk>
}}
