I Read, Therefore I Blog

The Blurb On The Back:

From international drag queen superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul comes his most revealing and personal work to date - a brutally honest and deeply intimate memoir.

From drag icon to powerhouse producer of one of the world’s largest television franchises, RuPaul’s chameleonic nature has always been part of his brand as both supermodel and super mogul. It is this adaptability that has made him enigmatic to the public. In this memoir, his most intimate and detailed book yet, RuPaul makes himself truly known.

Stripping away all artifice, RuPaul recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental other, to forging an identity in the punk and drag scenes in Atlanta and New York and finding enduring love with his husband Georges LeBar and self-acceptance in sobriety, RuPaul excavates his own biography, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history.

Here in RuPaul’s singular and extraordinary story is a manual for living - a personal philosophy that testifies to the value of a chosen family, the importance of harassing what makes you different and the transformational power of facing yourself fearlessly.

If we’re all born naked and the rest is drag, then this is RuPaul totally out of drag. This is RuPaul stripped bare.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

RuPaul Charles is a drag icon, actor, podcaster and the host and producer of an international drag show competition franchise. Although this memoir intends to reveal the real RuPaul and he talks a lot about a traumatic childhood through to the beginnings of his drag career and how he met his husband Georges LeBar, there’s a therapy filter at play here, which creates a sense of distance so I came away feeling like I hadn’t seen the real RuPaul.

The Blurb On The Back:

Birkenhead, 1973. The eighteen-year-old Paul O’Grady get ready for a big Saturday night out on the town. New white t-shirt, freshly ironed heads, looking good. As he bids farewell to his mum, who’s on the phone to his auntie, and wanders off down the street in a cloud of aftershave, he hears the familiar cry” ‘Oh, the devil rights out tonight, Annie. The devil rides out!’

The further adventures of Paul O’Grady - following on from the million-copy-selling At My Mother’s Knee - are, if anything, even more hilarious and outrageous than what has come before. As Paul struggles to get to grips with unexpected fatherhood and bereavement, he searches high and low for a job that lasts and somehow finds himself getting married in the process. Work takes him from an abattoir to a children’s home, from a hospital to a nightclub, and from penthouse to pavement. Along the way, he takes his first Savage steps on stage, tastes the exotic delights of Manila and invades Plans …

To say that The Devil Rides Out is action-packed is an understatement. Its extraordinary cast of characters includes lords and ladies, the legendary Vera, a serial killer, more prostitutes than you can shake a stick at and drag queens of every shape and size. Wickedly funny, often moving, and searingly honest, Paul’s tales of the unexpected will make your jaw drop and your hair stand on end. And you’ll laugh like a drain.

The Devil Rides Out - one hell of a read!

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The Verdict:

Paul O’Grady was a comedian, actor, TV presenter, chat show host and British national treasure. The second in his autobiographical quartet charts 1973 to 1980 as he deals with his father’s death, becomes a father, bounces between jobs, marries a lesbian, struggles to find a partner, travels internationally and starts to develop Lily Savage within the London drag scene. Told with O’Grady’s biting wit, it’s sad, thoughtful, horrifying and honest.

The Blurb On The Back:

In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across the table from Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and whose connections to the Islamic State are murky. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after he establishes a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he was a Marine. Ackerman then draws the shape of the Euphrates River on a large piece of paper, and his one-time adversary joins him, filling in the map with the names and dates of where they saw fighting during the war. They discover they had shadowed each other for some time, a realisation that brings them to a strange kind of intimacy.

Elliot Ackerman’s extraordinary memoir explores how he came to this refugee camp and what he hoped to find there. Moving between his recent experiences on the ground as a journalist in Syria and his Marine deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of astonishing atmospheric pressure.

At once an intensely personal book about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region and the world, Places and Names bids to take its place among our great books about modern war.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Elliot Ackerman is a novelist, journalist and former Marine who received the Silver Star, Bronze Star for Valour and Purple Heart during tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a sparsely written, thoughtful meditation on the US wars in the Middle East and his place in them and his meetings with Abu Hassar (an Al Qaeda fighter) are poignant but his reticence to go deep into the conflict make it a little frustrating at times.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author and prominent investigative journalist of our time, a heartfelt, hugely revealing memoir of a career breaking some of the most significant stories of the last half-century.

Seymour Hersh’s fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines in virtually every major newspaper in the English-speaking world, honours galore, and no small amount of controversy. In this memoir he describes what drove him and how, even when working for some of the US’s most prestigious publications, he worked as an independent outsider. Here, he tels the stories behind his own groundbreaking stories as he chases leads, cultivates sources, and grapples with the weight of what he uncovers, daring to challenge official narratives handed down from the powers that be. In telling these stories, Hersh divulges previously unreported information about some of his biggest scoops, including the My Lai massacre and the horror of Abu Grahib. This is essential reading on the power of the printed word at a time when good journalism is under fire as never before.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist known for his work uncovering the My Lai massacre, the Watergate scandal and the Abu Ghraib war crimes. This memoir focuses on his career and how he broke his biggest stories but offers nothing personal, no analysis of changes in the profession or the ways anonymous sources can be used and misused. I think the book suffers for that, leaving it an okay factual read rather than an insightful one.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

From relics of Georgian empire-building and slave-trading, through Victorian London’s barged-out refuse to 1980s fly-tipping and the pervasiveness of present-day plastics, Rag and Bone traces the story of our rubbish, and, through it, our history of consumption.

In a series of beachcombing and mudlarking walks - beginning in the Thames in central London, then out to the Kentish estuary and eventually the sea around Cornwall - Lisa Woollett also tells the story of her family, a number of whom made their living from London’s waste, and who made a similar journey downriver from the centre of the city to the sea.

A beautifully written but urgent mixture of social history, family memoir and nature writing, Rag and Bone is a book about what we can learn from what we’ve thrown away - and a call to think more about what we leave behind.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Lisa Woollett is a beachcomber and award-winning photographer. This thoughtful book (structured around mudlarking on the Thames and beachcombing in Cornwall) combines her family history with the history of consumption and the effect that waste is having on nature. However it’s a shame that Woollett never really explains why she’s so fascinated by mudlarking/beachcombing or why she regards certain objects as treasure and others as waste.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

Adrian Bleese spent twelve years flying on police helicopters, and attended almost 3,000 incidents, as one of only a handful of civilian air observers working anywhere in the world.

In Above The Law he recounts the most intriguing, challenging, amusing and downright baffling episodes in his career working for Suffolk Constabulary and the National Police Air Service. Rescuing lost walkers, chasing cars down narrow country lanes, searching for a rural cannabis factory and disrupting an illegal forest rave … they’re all in a day’s work.

It’s a side of policing that most of us never see, and he describes it with real compassion as he lives his dream job, indulging his love of flying, the English landscape and helping people. Perhaps more than anything, it’s a story about hope.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Adrian Bleese is a former RAF electronics operator turned police civilian control room operator and then police helicopter service civilian observer. This jovial memoir offers a good operational overview of what police helicopters do and how they operate and, depressingly, how they have been squandered due to poor management and cuts. However it does sometimes get bogged down in digression and if you want salacious cases, then it’s not for you.

ABOVE THE LAW will be released in the United Kingdom on 19th July 2021. Thanks to Eye Books for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

”We don’t see color.”
“I didn’t know Black people liked Star Wars.”

When Frederick Joseph was a Black student in a largely white high school there were many hurtful comments that he often just let go. Now he and fourteen other prominent artists and activists discuss their experiences of racism in their teenage years and beyond.

Offering himself as a friend to the reader, Joseph explores everything from cultural appropriation to “reverse racism” and white privilege.

Both a conversation starter and a tool kit, this is an essential read for committed anti-racists and newcomers to the cause of racial justice alike.

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The Verdict:

Frederick Joseph is a writer, award-winning activist, philanthropist and marketing professional. This YA book draws on Joseph’s and 14 other contributors’ teen experiences to provide teaching moments to white people about the Black experience while also offering people of colour affirmation. It’s a difficult read at times albeit a necessary one and the start of a conversation but it is short and at times I thought it needed a bit more depth.

THE BLACK FRIEND: ON BEING A BETTER WHITE PERSON was released in the United Kingdom on 1st April 2021. Thanks to Walker Books for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

”My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.”

As a struggling single mum, determined to keep a roof over her daughter’s head, Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, working long hours in order to provide for her small family.

As she worked hard to climb her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labour jobs as a cleaner whilst also juggling higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren’t being told. The stories of the overworked and underpaid.

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The Verdict:

Stephanie Land is from a working class background who, shortly after the birth of her daughter, found herself as a homeless, single mother. In this ultimately unsatisfying memoir she describes working as a cleaner for a middle class oblivious to her problems and is very good at describing how she had to navigate the byzantine US welfare and food stamps system but I never felt that I knew who she was or why she was in this situation.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

”Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity ... A continent of Cape Verdean favelas, Algerian flea markets, Surinamese shamanism, German reggae and Moorish castles. Yes, all this was part of Europe too.”

Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of the places where Europeans of African descent live their lives. Setting off from his hometown of Sheffield, Johny Pitts makes his way through Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Moscow, Rome, Marseille and Lisbon, through council estates, political spaces, train stations, tour groups, and underground arts scenes.

Here is an alternative map of the continent, revealing plural identities and liminal landscapes, from a Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon to RInkeby, the eighty per cent Muslim area of Stockholm, from West African students at university in Moscow to the notorious Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. A Europe populated by Egyptian nomads, Sudanese restaurateurs, Belgo-Congolese painters. Their voices speak to Afropean experiences that demand to be heard.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer and broadcaster who founded the online journal Afropean.com. In this insightful, compassionate and thought-provoking book that’s part anthropology, part memoir, part travelogue and part rumination on the black experience within Europe, he seeks to “honestly reveal the secret pleasures and prejudices of others as well as myself” and make sense of what it means to be a black citizen in Europe.

AFROPEAN: NOTES FROM BLACK EUROPE was released in the United Kingdom on 6th June 2019. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

The Blurb On The Back:

Susan Calman’s enthusiasm and happiness at being on Strictly Come Dancing was an inspiration to all of us. Cheer Up Love, Susan’s first book, had a clear aim: to help people understand depression. Sunny Side Up has a similarly clear path: to persuade people to be kinder to each other and spread more joy.

These are extremely difficult and confusing times – people are cross and shouty. It’s exhausting! But more than anything, people like Susan, people who don’t hate other people, are apologising for the way they think. Susan wants to make sure that they don’t.

She wants them to know that it’s ok to love people, that kindness and community are wonderful and brilliant, and to bring on the joy in the little things in life and help defeat the hate and fear.

Susan is a one-woman army of hope and joy, and she’s ready to lead the nation in a different direction.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Susan Calman is a corporate lawyer-turned-comedian who appeared on Strictly Come Dancing in 2017. In this book, which refers heavily to her Strictly experiences, she urges readers to practice kindness and thereby bring joy to themselves and others. It’s not the deepest of messages but I liked the wry, at times pointed, humour she deploys when sharing her experiences and making her arguments and I hope that it brings her more fans.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.