==Autobiography==
{{newreview
|author=Natalie Taylor
|title=Signs of Life
|rating=3
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Natalie Taylor was just twenty four years old, and five months pregnant, when her husband died in a tragic accident. This memoir takes us from the day she found out he was dead through to her son's first birthday. Natalie's situation is horribly sad. I can't even begin to imagine what I would have done in her place. The record of her grieving process is very raw and honest. Based upon her journals that she kept through this time her pain leaps off the page and makes you feel sick inside for the horror she's facing. I liked that she doesn't seem to be advocating a correct way to grieve. She simply states how she felt, how she reacted at each moment, be that calmly and quietly or with raging, screaming tears. Luckily she had an extremely supportive family and a good group of friends and it is interesting - if rather disturbing - to follow her progress as she deals with her life without her husband.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444724673</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Schama
|summary=Along with most of my contemporaries I've never read 'The Lady' except once when looking for an au pair job in my student days, and that, it turns out, is the problem. Before Rachel Johnson was appointed in June 2009 the average age of the readership was 75, the circulation was dropping and the magazine was haemorrhaging money. The Budworth family, proprietors of 'The Lady' since it was founded 125 years ago, chose son and heir Ben Budworth to turn the magazine's fortunes around before it folded. He asked Rachel Johnson to be editor.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490674</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jo Brand
|title=Can't Stand Up For Sitting Down
|rating=3
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=I am a big fan of Jo Brand and I love her inimitable droll style of comedy. I always enjoy her stand up performances as well as her appearances on my favourite panel programme QI. As a consequence I was really interested to read her second autobiographical book – Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down. As she states at the beginning though, this is not really an autobiography but a collection of thoughts and experiences that have resulted due to her life as a stand up comedian. The book covers the period from her first professional gig up to the present day. Her early life and career in psychiatric nursing are covered in her earlier book [[Look Back in Hunger by Jo Brand|Look Back in Hunger]].
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755355261</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ellen MacArthur
|title=Full Circle
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=
It's some years since I read [[Taking on the World by Ellen MacArthur|Taking on the World]] and – against all expectations thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm not a sailor and don't have a great deal of interest in yacht racing – but what appealed to me immediately was the character of someone who was determined not to let ''anything'' stand in the way of her ambitions. My only disappointment came later as I felt that the book had been written too soon – I really wanted to know about '''that''' big race and what you do with the future when you've done everything. How lucky did I feel when ''Full Circle'' landed on my desk?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0718148630</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alan Davies
|title=Teenage Revolution: Growing Up in the 80s
|rating=3.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Born in 1966, Alan Davies grew up in Essex, the son of a staunchly Conservative-voting father and a mother who died of cancer when he was only six. It was a childhood dominated at first by 'Citizen Smith' and the other TV sitcoms, 'Starsky and Hutch', 'Grease', Barry Sheene, the Barron Knights, and Debbie Harry. The book begins at 1978, ''the year I started venturing out more'', and finishes at 1988, when he graduated from Kent University to find that stand-up comedy could be an alternative to finding a job where he would have to do what he was told.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141041803</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mark Oaten
|title=Screwing Up
|rating=4.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Like John Profumo and others, Mark Oaten will probably be remembered for the wrong reasons. It was the episode which made him for a while the country's No. 1 paparazzi target, and which as he recounts in his Prologue, when his 'world was crashing down' and it hardly needs recounting in detail. Yet when all is said and done, this is a very lively, readable, sometimes quite poignant memoir from one of the men whose career at Westminster began and ended with the Blair and Brown years. Throughout there is an admirable absence of self-pity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849540071</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tony Fitzjohn
|title=Born Wild: The Extraordinary Story of One Man's Passion for Lions and for Africa
|rating=4.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Maybe it's just my rock-chick nature but "Born Wild" feels a little clunky as titles go. Surely it should have been "Born To Be Wild"? Perhaps that phrase has been copyrighted and wasn't available. Or maybe Fitzjohn was deliberately referencing Joy Adamson's book "Born Free" – since much of the early part of his own time in Africa was spent with her husband George. "Born To Be Wild" would have been more accurate as well. Many of the animals we meet weren't born wild at all – though a good few of them got to live out the remainder of their days and die that way.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918911</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Judith Summers
|title=The Badness of King George
|rating=5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=People know how to get round me: they offer me a book and then say 'It's about a dog' and like Pavlov's canine I say 'Oh, lovely'. And so it was with The Badness of King George. George is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and I have to quibble with the title – superb as it is – because George is not bad. If anything he's badly done by as Judith Summers, plagued by empty nest syndrome when her son goes to university, decides to foster rescue dogs. Poor George has absolutely no idea what she's let him in for. And nor has Judith.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141046473</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kevin Lewis
|title=The Kid: A True Story
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Kevin Lewis grew up on a poverty-stricken London council estate in the sort of home that the neighbours complain about. His mother – inadequate by any measure – hated him more than most of her six children and he was beaten and starved by both of his parents. You might think that Social Services would have stepped in and removed him, but any relief was to be short-lived. Eventually he was put into care but even then the support was inadequate and Kevin found himself caught up in a criminal underworld where he was known simply as 'The Kid'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>014104859X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dai Henley
|title=B Positive
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Dai Henley counts himself lucky to have been born to loving and nurturing parents. When they discovered that his blood group was B positive they gave him his motto in life, and coincidentally, the title of this book. As he explains, it's not a celebrity autobiography (you might be selling yourself a little short there, Dai) and nor is it a misery memoir. It's the story of a man who has made the most of every opportunity he's been given – and a few mistakes along the way – but he's won through despite the difficulties and played a fair amount of sport too.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907499180</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Malalai Joya
|title=Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Forget entertainment – this is a book to read if you have any interest in the war in Afghanistan. My particular view has developed from a British armchair, comprising part emotional reaction, a smidgeon of history and an over-reliance on British media sources. In a war zone where truth has been a casualty throughout, this book gives the general reader an authentic view of conditions in Afghanistan over the past twenty five years of continual warfare. Written by a young and hot-headed, wildly patriotic 'ordinary' woman, this is no more reliable than any other partisan view, but its value is to help put official news sources into their proper context. I found it educative in several senses.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846041503</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Steve Duno
|title=Last Dog On The Hill
|rating=5
|genre=Pets
|summary=Driving through northern California Steve Duno found a puppy by the side of the road. He was flea-bitten, tic infested, emaciated and suffering from an infection. His father was a Rottweiler and his mother a German Shepherd - both were guard dogs at the local marijuana farm. When Steve whistled the dog came to him and it's no exaggeration to say that in that moment his life changed. He'd always wanted a dog, but hadn't been able to have one as a child. There was a moment's indecision at the side of the road – and then Lou became Steve's dog.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330520024</amazonuk>
}}
