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==Autobiography==
{{newreview
|author=Matt MacAllester
|title=Bittersweet: Lessons from my Mother's Kitchen
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Matt MacAllester is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, used to covering the horrors of war, but nothing prepared him for his investigation into the life and death of his mother Anne. In May 2005 Ann MacAllester died suddenly of a heart attack and her son was overwhelmed by grief. This might not sound unusual, but his mother had been largely absent from him for about a quarter of a century, trapped in her own private world of madness. His earliest memories were of an idyllic childhood, where wonderful food was always at the centre of family life and with the help of Elizabeth David, his mother’s favourite cookery writer he sought to find his mother through the food she cooked.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408800942</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Olga Alexandrovna, Paul Kulikovsky, Sue Woolmans and Karen Roth-Nicholls
|summary=Joaquin 'Jack' Garcia worked for the FBI. That might sound rather glamorous but Jack had a special claim to fame. He was one of those rare people who always worked undercover – not just for hours or days at a time but sometimes for years. In ''Making Jack Falcone'' he tells the story of how he came to infiltrate the Mafia in New York and was responsible for a string of arrests which crippled the organised crime families. If that doesn't sound impressive enough, then just consider that Jack Garcia was a Cuban-born American and he went undercover as an Italian amongst Italians.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847393942</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Lucy Mangan
|title=My Family and Other Disasters
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Not living in the UK means that we don't have British newspapers. Even when we lived in England, we never bought ''The Guardian'', so I had never actually heard of Lucy Mangan before being sent this book. That's probably not a bad thing, since I began the book - a collection of her Guardian columns - without any preconceptions.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0852651244</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Buzz Aldrin
|title=Magnificent Desolation
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=It seems the first thing one does when one lands on the moon is go through all but the final steps in the process of flying straight back up - just in case. The first thing one does when one steps down on to the moon is to make sure you can step back up into your lunar module - just in case there's a panic somewhere. The first thing one does when land back on earth - you would think - would be to have the same urgency to get back up and out there, but life has a habit of getting in the way.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408804026</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Bernard P Morgan
|title=Memories of the Rare Old Times: Through The Eyes of a Dubliner
|rating=2
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=This is the story of Bernard Morgan, one of nine children growing up in Dublin in the 50s. As a boy Bernard tells us about his love of football and boxing. He played truant from school, preferring to smoke cigarettes instead and, as he got older, he hung around in gangs with his brothers and friends. We hear of the wars they had, and how the Irish stick by one another. Finally we see him go to England where he tries to find work, sleeping rough and living on nothing. Along the way we meet the street people of Dublin and above all Bernard's family.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904312454</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Vicky Jaggers
|title=Silenced
|rating=3.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Vicky Jaggers had a dreadful childhood. One sister was in a home following an accident which made her violent and her elder brother, David, was obviously her mother's favourite. He was very intelligent, but disliking any sort of work his abilities were directed towards getting what he wanted without making any effort. The family moved house regularly as Vicky's father looked for work and schooling soon became an option which wasn't always chosen. Sexually mature at the age of nine and looking much older than her years she took to spending much of her time in the pubs her parents ran and it was whilst her parents were serving in the bar that David raped her – on three successive nights – when she was only twelve. Her pregnancy wasn't evident for six months.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340976772</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Ruth Merry and Steve Emecz
|title=Enabled: One Disabled Woman's Incredible Story of Tackling Her Disability in Pursuit of a Lifelong Dream
|rating=3.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Ruth Merry has never been your common-or-garden young lady. Born with no ability to move her legs, and more, due to a condition called arthrogryposis, she still became an avid equestrian, downhill skier, competitive swimmer, fund-raiser and more. At the beginning of this book a flippant comment inspires another, future dream - that of going down in a four-man bobsleigh.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904312322</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Lucy Wadham
|title=The Secret Life of France
|rating=4
|genre=Travel
|summary=I'm rather at a loss to describe this book for you, and I'm still uncertain how to categorise it. It's part personal memoir and part analytical. Whether you regard this particular mix as brilliant or irritating is down, I suppose, to personal taste and intellectual curiosity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571236111</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Lynn Barber
|title=An Education
|rating=5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Lynn Barber comes from the ''lower, unremembered, orders on both sides''. There is no ancestral home or village – just parents who were determined that she should work hard and make something of herself. Well, they were – until Simon proposed and it was explained to her that Oxford didn't really matter, that being married to a good man would be more important. Simon was much older – older in fact than he would admit to – and he picked Lynn up (quite literally) at a bus stop when she was just sixteen. Surprisingly her parents were unworried by this and threw them together, despite the fact that Simon, who was in the property business, had some strange friends. In the nineteen fifties it wasn't every sixteen year old girl who had a passing acquaintance with the evil slum landlord, Peter Rachman.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141039558</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Stan Cattermole
|title=Bete de Jour
|rating=4.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=''Something's just come in that might appeal to you'', said Sue from The Bookbag, having just taken delivery of ''Bête de Jour''. Pleased to be thought of, I never mustered the courage to ask whether this thought was motivated by a previous liking for bloke lit, or by the book's subtitle: ''The Intimate Adventures of an Ugly Man''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007312741</amazonuk>
}}

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