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Good Reading : November 2007
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38 goodreading ı NOVEMBER 2007 word of mouth biography / memoir Everything about books www.goodreadingmagazine.com ONLINE Three Seasons Jane Hanson This is a memoir of motherhood with a chilling differ- ence. Jane Hanson, a ournalist who spent much of her work- ing life writing about world issues, tells the greatest story of her life.The first third of this book relates Jane’s fascinating travels through war zones, political riots and coups, but it’s the rest of the book that will truly pull you in. Three Seasons is a heart-wrench- ing account of the highs of pregnancy and the almost unbearable lows that can follow. There were times reading this book when tears streamed down my face. I couldn’t believe that one couple could go through so much torture, but as Jane so selflessly points out, she is by no means alone. The third part of the book is happy- sad; about the conflicting emotions of finally having a healthy baby. Jane discovered that society doesn’t handle death well, especially the death of a child. It was this discovery that led her to write Three Seasons, to show people how to deal with others’ grief. It cannot be an easy feat to share the loss of your child with the world, but Hanson does it brilliantly. Writing about her loss, she succeeds in highlighting the gift of life, and thus, this book offers an important message to all who are lucky enough to read it. ★★★★★ Macmillan $32.95 Reviewed by Rachael Blair Unzipped Suzi Quatro Long before the days of the manufactured rock star there was a chick turn- ing it up on the music scene and her name was Suzi Quatro. Clad from head to toe in a sexy, skin- tight leather jumpsuit, Suzi took to the stage with her bass guitar and rocked it with the best of them. In her autobiography, Suzi talks candidly about the little girl from Detroit who watched Elvis shaking his pelvis on television and knew from that day she wanted to be a rock star. After being spotted by a leading producer from the UK, Suzi packed up and moved to Lon- don. She had huge hits back in the ’70s with Can the Can and Devil Gate Drive and played the character Leather Tuscadero my all-time favourite) with her trademark leather suit and ough chick attitude on the ’80s elevision show ‘Happy Days’. Unzipped is an honest, unny and at times raw account f Suzi’s rise to stardom. Now n her fifties and a grandmother, she is still touring the world. For all the ‘twentysomethings’ reading this review saying ‘who?’, do yourselves a favour and listen to Quatro. For the rest of us, Unzipped is a trip down memory lane to the days when rock stars were rock stars and legends like Suzi Quatro were bor n. ★★★★★ Hodder & Stoughton $35.00 Reviewed by Kylie Field Bad Hair Days Pamela Bone Pamela Bone, author of the popular memoir and exploration of Australian child- hoods Up We Grew, here writes a very different kind of memoir: an account of her life and thoughts since she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma (a cancer of the bone mar row) in 2004. As Pamela says, ‘the reason I was thirsty and dizzy was that my bones were melting into my bloodstream’. Now that’s a pretty gruesome state- ment, and there is plenty in the book that makes you ache for the pain and privation suffered by people with any form of cancer – but it is just as important to emphasise the sheer joy of reading this very fine medita- tion on life, death, illness, war, Islam, women’s rights, voluntary euthanasia and many more subjects. For many years Pamela was a leader writer and columnist for the Age newspaper. ‘There,’ she writes near the end of the book, ‘I see that again, instead of writing a diary about cancer I have written an opinion column.’ But every single opinion expressed by Pamela Bone, one of Australia’s best jour nalists, is worth reading and pondering. Bad Hair Days is in the great tradition of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and John Diamond’s C: Because Cowards Get Cancer too. Savour every word. ★★★★ Melbourne University Press $32.95 Reviewed by Alison Pressley Searching for Schindler Tom Keneally We’ve all read the book and seen the movie. Now Tom Keneally tells us how he came to write Schindler’s Ark, which won the 1982 Booker Prize and became the basis of the Oscar- winning film Schindler’s List. It all started in 1980 when Keneally needed a new briefcase in Califor nia. Stranger than fiction was a Polish-bor n shopkeeper who told him how his life, and hundreds of others, had been saved during the Holocaust by a Ger man Nazi industrialist, Oskar Schindler. The man was no saint, said Leopold Page (for merly Pfefferberg and known as Poldek), but he had a conscience. In this memoir spanning the past 27 years, Keneally tells how he traced urvivors of Schindler’s st, accompanied by the ndomitable Poldek, who ied in 2001. Keneally dmits to having ‘an indus- rial approach to writing’ and since 1966 he has written 27 novels, nine non-fiction works and even two children’s books. With a new novel out this year as well as this memoir, Keneally is still prolific, but the boy from Homebush (‘on the earth’s left buttock’) does not take his good fortune for granted. In mid-career, when he met Poldek, he found it a renewing experi- ence to have a tale before him that he believed the world needed to hear. This memoir is a fine companion to that tale. ★★★★ Knopf $$45.00 Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
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