Although the book remains positive and celebrative of the joy that family life can bring, Fraser certainly doesn’t sugar coat it or suggest, at any point, that parenting is an easy thing. Instead, she provides funny anecdotes that most parents will readily relate to, and may also learn something from.
Tag: nonfiction
A review of Debt free, Ca$hed Up and Laughing by Cath Armstrong and Lea-Anne Brighton
The book is easy and fast to read, and is neatly structured so it can be used as an ongoing reference, especially for some of the recipes like cleaning products, home-made cosmetics, and craft items like play-dough and beads. Debt free, Ca$hed up, and Laughing is a fun, enjoyable book to read which could make a real difference in the kind of lifestyle you have.
A review of Shakespeare the Thinker by A.D. Nuttall
Nuttall uses wit and personal recollections to illuminate his text. The result is lively and relaxed although he makes no concessions to difficulties. His explanations are cogent and full. As a book by a writer worth reading for his own sake and as one of the dozen books that any reader of Shakespeare should have, this is not only an essential book, it is a delight.
A review of Virginia Woolf by Julia Briggs
This book dwells necessarily on the Bloomsbury group, a subject of so many books that saturation impairs the urgency of its interest, but she surmounts this as much as possible by an emphasis on Woolf. She has written a model of what good literary criticism should be. This is an excellent book to add to the collection of any reader who requires a useful and intriguing book on a fascinating but often elusive writer.
A review of The Paris Review Interviews, volume 1
Overall, Gourevitch’s hope that these interviews will stand “if not as definitive portraits of each artist, then as a significant contribution to such an ultimate portrait, with the added fascination that they are in large measure self-portraits” has been, on my reading, largely fulfilled.
A review of On Opera by Bernard Williams
This book will contribute something to your knowledge of opera but it will not be easy to read. The awkwardness of Williams’s English makes the book unpleasant. It baffles me that a man who obviously had such a love for music could have written so unmusically.
A review of The Early Works of Dr. Seuss Volume 1
At £14.99, this book is cheap at the price, and an excellent introduction to Geisel’s work. It is a commendable mix of the silly, the sinister and the political, drawn from a wide variety of sources across advertising, newspapers and magazines. The relatively low production values, however, will mean that it will have limited appeal to the very people most likely to buy it or be given it: comic collectors.
A review of The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hall Iggulden
Yes, there’s a halcyon quality to The Dangerous Book for Boys, after all, in the main, children hardly learn history these days, grow up mostly without a well rounded education that includes Latin and grammar, don’t know how to make a…
New Stereotypes: Carroll & Graf’s Freedom in this Village
The book assumes that race and homosexuality (blackness and gayness) are real categories, and draws part of its authority from the social and historical importance these subjects have been given by many people through the years, but the idea of race is as suspect as the idea of strict sexual orientations. Skin is not a significant emblem of existential being (despite hundreds of years of western racialism, and the 1930s Negritude movement in Africa, France, Haiti, and Martinique, and the 1960s/70s black arts movement in the United States).
A review of Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos
Despite its length, this is an engrossing book. It may not rival those great achievements in biography that one can read for their own sake, but everyone with an interest in Perec will find it essential. Although David Bellos rather…