I have received the book as a Christmas gift from a friend who told me that she had two options: read it to understand me or give it to me so that I could know someone just like me :)
I really enjoyed the book and read it in 2 days. Elizabeth writes in a colorfull way. Her journey is indeed more than a journey and because I felt much like her I appreciated every piece of it.
The italian...
I bought this book for my Mum who was born in Barrow and lived there during the war.Nella writes with the pen of an ordinary woman in extraordinary times.Her writing is wonderful, from the description of an ordinary yet delightful lunch to her description of the countryside on a day out with a picnic, her fears for times to come and of course her family.Complemented with some black and white photographs,its...
I write this in late 2008 as the global financial system goes into meltdown and the credit crunch is really biting into our individual pockets. What Nella Last would make of our sickeningly materialistic, wasteful, 'spend spend spend' times I cannot imagine!
On a domestic level we could all learn a lot from Nella's money-saving, waste-avoiding methods. Her descriptions of the meals she contrives...
This book is a very influential read and lives up to it's purpose.
Mary-Kate and Ashley have done a great job interviewing the featured people and the books design is very nice. The book has a lot of interesting quotes and it was nice to get an insight into the lives of how the true "originals" grew up and got started in their fields (Karl Largerfeld, Lauren Hutton and Diana von Frustenberg to...
Enormously interesting story of life for a young girl in a pre war country house environment and its impact on her life.She felt immensely priviledged to have had such a happy childhood in a world long since vanished and her stories from a child's vantage point of the "upstairs & downstairs" world are not to be missed.To me it is the genuine article warts and all! Very well written and absorbing I...
In 1914 Vera Brittain was 21 years old, and an undergraduate student at Somerville College, Oxford. When war broke out in August of that year, Brittain "temporarily" disrupted her studies to enrol as a volunteer nurse, nursing casualties both in England and on the Western Front. The next four years were to cause a deep rupture in Brittain's life, as she witnessed not only the horrors of war first...
A very short book and a pretty poor one at that. This could have been written in a Sunday Paper pull-out it's that short! All I get out of this `book' is a little rich girl abusing life's privileges. She, at one time says, "I'm nothing more than white trash"; her father was Eddie Fisher, her mother Debbie Reynolds....GET A GRIP WOMAN!
I read the book in a couple of hours and I still don't...
Diana Athill has had a most interesting and varied life, and the title she has chosen for her autobiography is proofreaders' jargon for "Let it stand". In other words: no regrets. It's a fine title. As a grand old lady of British publishing, Athill can look back on 50 years of work with the great Andre Deutsch, and many close-working relationships with writers such as VS Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Brian...
Unlike many of the other reviewers for this book I don't have any connection to midwifery, London or the 1950s and I still absolutely loved this book. Worth lets us into the lives of a number of very interesting characters, some of her tales are heartwarming and humourous, others truly devastating. I found the balance between the two made the book very interesting and enjoyable to read. I definitely...
