Michele Kirsch0.0 When she leaves home in New York to go to college in Boston in the 1970s, Michele Kirsch – an anxious 19-year-old, with a growing valium dependency – starts taking on cleaning jobs to help make ends meet.
It gives her a window on the life she hopes to live: big comfortable house, teenagers’ music blaring from their rooms, a crock pot bubbling away in the kitchen... And yet, when she finally does have something like that life, as a wife and mother in 1980s London, she is the one blaring music from her room, necking vodka and valium and making an almighty mess of her home and family.
Cleaning other people’s houses, eventually, is the only option left. At 50 years old, post rehab, living alone in a Hackney bedsit, Michele finds herself finishing her working life as she had begun, “in a dumb job that you do when you can’t really do anything else...”
This is a remarkable, powerful, and often unbearably funny memoir in which cleaning and getting clean intertwine as a strange and magical form of redemption. Michele Kirsch is a Nora Ephron for the modern age.
Энн Гриффин4.5 A tale of a single night. The story of a lifetime.
If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said and done?
This is the story of Maurice Hannigan, who, over the course of a Saturday night in June, orders five different drinks at the Rainford House Hotel. With each he toasts a person vital to him: his doomed older brother, his troubled sister-in-law, his daughter of fifteen minutes, his son far off in America, and his late, lamented wife. And through these people, the ones who left him behind, he tells the story of his own life, with all its regrets and feuds, loves and triumphs.
Beautifully written, powerfully felt, When All Is Said promises to be the next great Irish novel.
Stephen Morris0.0 Black Tea is a book about Russia that starts in London at the height of the Cold War and ends on a beach in Crimea forty years later. It takes those elements of the writer's life that were forged into something new during the disruption and breakup of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, to create a different kind of memoir based on reflections, memory, and a narration that starts in England and leads the reader on a journey through Russia from the White Sea to the Caucasus.
It tells two stories, one that begins in suburban England in the 70s, and one that traces the course of a love affair in Moscow twenty years later. They are narrated during the course of a journey through Russia at the time of the commemorations for the hundred-year anniversary of the revolution in 2017.
The book comes to terms with what has been described as the central lacuna in twentieth-century thought - the tacit support for communism by Western intellectuals. It describes the author's father's support of Russia and his activism on behalf of nuclear disarmament in the 1970s, and contrasts this with his grandmother's stark warnings of the evils of socialism, and his own ambiguous position growing up in the suburbs outside London, a position that was for many years dominated, in spirit, by a huge military map of the Soviet Union tacked to his bedroom wall.
In the first section of the book the author leaves England to visit his family in Russia. They go on a camping trip to the White Sea, driving north on the Archangel Road to the old labour camp on the island of Solovki.
The camping holiday comes to an end in the breakfast bar of a chalet-hotel. And so begins an extended journey alone. Morris drives back to Moscow, to the flat where he once lived and which is now empty but still full of memories. He tells the story of the August coup of 1991 and the October disturbances two years later, of the tanks on the streets, the bombardment of the Russian parliament building, and the partisan welcome he received during the nights of troubles from those people who felt they were fighting against the reactionary forces of repression.
From Moscow he takes a train south to the Caucasus. He reflects on the emotional end of his own marriage and on the death of his father and grandmother. Morris travels to Astrakhan, the failed final destination of Hitler's sixth army who were desperate to reach the oil fields. From Astrakhan he takes a bus to Elbrus, the highest peak in the Caucasus and then continues on to Grozny, a destroyed city, now rebuilt but still festering from its wounds. The final stage in the journey takes him to Crimea, the scene of his own love-story, and the destination over years of countless Russian and Soviet lovers and would-be lovers, looking for happiness in the coves and dark-sand beaches along the Black Sea coast.
Highly informed with a unique perspective, Black Tea chronicles the changing face of Russia over his thirty years there. A reflection and a travelogue, Steve Morris hauntingly explores love and identity, commitment and family.
Дэвид Нотт4.3 "Я исколесил мир в поисках проблем" – так могла бы начинаться история какого-нибудь авантюриста, стремящегося испытать себя в экстремальных условиях. И это была бы книга о приключениях, полуправдивых и захватывающих. Но автор этой фразы и книги, совсем не путешественник и крайне далек от художественного вымысла, ведь ему довелось столкнуться с самой неприглядной реальностью, какую только можно себе представить, – войной. Доктор Нотт побывал в Афганистане, Ираке, Сирии и других горячих точках, оперировал и принимал роды под грохот разрывающихся снарядов и вытаскивал с того света людей в условиях, не имевших ничего общего с хорошо оборудованными европейскими клиниками. Эту книгу он написал, пытаясь ответить самому себе на вопрос: что заставляет врача отправляться в самые опасные места на планете и, несмотря на творящийся вокруг ужас, с риском для собственной жизни выполнять свою работу, помогать и утешать людей, оказавшихся в беде.
Celia Paul0.0 I’m not a portrait painter. If I’m anything, I have always been an autobiographer.
Self-Portrait reveals a life truly lived through art. In this short, intimate memoir, Celia Paul moves effortlessly through time in words and images, folding in her past and present selves. From her move to the Slade School of Fine Art at sixteen, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practices of her present-day studio, she meticulously assembles the surprising, beautiful, haunting scenes of a life. Paul brings to her prose the same qualities that she brings to her art: a brutal honesty, a delicate but powerful intensity, and an acute eye for visual detail.
At its heart, this is a book about a young woman becoming an artist, with all the sacrifices and complications that entails. As she moves out of Freud’s shadow, and navigates a path to artistic freedom, Paul’s power and identity as an artist emerge from the page.
Self-Portrait is a uniquely arresting, poignant book, and a work of art and literature by a singular talent.
