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{{newreview
|title=The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink
|author=Olivia Laing
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Coming from a family with an alcoholic background, Olivia Laing became fascinated by the idea of why and how some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature were written by those with a drink problem. The list soon became a long one – Dylan Thomas, Raymond Chandler, Jack London, Jean Rhys, to name but a few, instantly came to mind. In the spring of 2011 she crossed the Atlantic to take a trip across the USA, from New York City and New Orleans to Chicago and Seattle by hired car and train, in the course of which she took a close look at the link between creativity and alcohol which inspired the work of six authors, namely F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Taking her title from a character in Williams’s play ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ who says he is taking a trip to echo spring, an euphemism for the liquor cabinet, she travels to the places which were pivotal in their often overlapping lives and work.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847677940</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|title=Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz
|summary=The main focus of the book is the relationship between Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, two very well-off American lesbians who first met in Paris when the former was 39 and the latter 41. It was the beginning of an often mercurial partnership which lasted for fifty years. However, despite the author’s insistence, it is less a double biography than a survey of the Sapphic society life which centred on Paris for much of this period. Barney, a poet, was a flamboyant character who used to say that 'living was the first of all the arts' and often vowed to make 'my life itself into a poem'. Brooks, a painter whose self-portrait adorns the front cover, was the product of a difficult childhood, abused by her mother who far preferred her mentally unbalanced brother, often proclaimed sadly that 'my dead mother stands between me and life'. An aloof soul, she made a brief marriage with the homosexual John Ellingham Brooks but left him within a year.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780878826</amazonuk>
}}
