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Advantages: Entertaining and interesting read
Disadvantages: Could have been longer

...John recently published his autobiography Anything Goes, chronicling his first forty years. His sister, Carole E. Barrowman helped him write it and between the two of them, the tone is perfect and you can easily hear John's voice coming through the text. The hardback version has a cover price of £18.99, but you can buy it for about half that if you look online. I got mine from Amazon UK for £9.49. It is around 250 pages, split into nineteen chapters. ...
...the end of the book. Anything Goes never becomes dull and each chapter has something interesting and shows the reader more about John's life, career, family and friends. He comes across just as he seems on television appearances - warm, friendly, caring, energetic, and full of life, frank, cheeky, confident and endearing. He isn't afraid of writing it how it is and is happy to laugh at his own actions. Although a couple of incidents he recalls did ... Read review

Advantages: A good book with loads of info and fun to read
Disadvantages: None

Anything Goes is the biography written by John Barrowman with the help of his sister Carole. John first came to my attention when I watched him appear in Dancing on Ice, I did not know much about him before this and thought he was a very good looking fun guy so it was after seeing this that I started noticing him in more and more shows in the TV. THE BOOK The book is split into 19 chapters, each chapter has its title taken from a song which has ...
...laid out in the traditional way, starting with him as a child and progressing through his life to where he is now. He has written to book as if he was talking to you personally over a drink and started off with one thing and they it has digressed into other parts of his life. Even though it is a bit all over the place in years it is still very easy to follow. The back of the book has a time line so you can follow his career through the years in ... Read review

Advantages: Informative
Disadvantages: None

People have the impression of Gordon as an arrogant, foul mouthed chef. However, this is the persona he adopts to achieve his goals successfully, and this read highlights how he has got there. A follow on from Humble Pie, the book goes in to more depth on the business side of his life, where risks were taken to get where he is today. Lessons that he has learnt along the way are both informative and amusing. His plight to go from a well known UK ...
...What we do learn about Gordon is his passion to develop the people who have been most loyal to him. Angela Hartnett is mentioned a few times throughout the book, as it goes from him owning his first restaurant right through to his MNC Gordon Ramsay Holdings. Loyalty is shown to be a key factor in his life, and as he has progressed, so have the people who have helped him get there. A great read and very inspiring! ... Read review

Advantages: Well written, easy to read
Disadvantages: Nothing new, its all been written before

Madonna - love her or loathe her, it seems that everyone has an opinion about her. With a career that now spans over 25 years her rise to fame from the early days when she first arrived in New York, penniless but with huge ambitions has been well documented many times. Madonna - Queen of the world by Douglas Thompson could at first glance quite easily be dismissed as yet another regurgitated account of Madonna's rise to fame but from the sleeve notes ...
...that everyone claims to already know everything there is to know about. Madonna has given many interviews throughout her life. Usually these interviews are carefully timed to coincide with her latest project, be it a new album, movie, book or other project and the new image that compliments the project is always flaunted to its maximum effect. When it comes to being interviewed Madonna always calls the shots, so how can anyone really expect to know ... Read review

Advantages: A true life account of a terrible accident.
Disadvantages: You don't always get a happy ending in real life.

The book I will now review contains probably one of the worst nightmares any parent could anticipate, the fact is a biography detailing the entire scenario makes it even more difficult and heart wrenching to read. The book I will now review is "Shattered", by Mavis Marsh and ghost written by Andrew Crofts. The book starts with the awful words of the doctor that has done the pre assessment on Mavis's son Mathew - "Your son will be a cabbage for ...
...a vegetable, or what-ever you want to call him". From that awful statement the story goes back to Mavis's ( the mother, writer and teller of this somewhat frightening story), childhood, first detailing her parents life, from jobs and home life, through to her father serving in the war and the untold horrors he had witnessed. From this she went on to her school life, until reading further into the book I never quite understood the purpose for all ... Read review