Biography Books > F Biography Books

Advantages: It educates about Islam's roots and the hospitality of the Middle East
Disadvantages: I honestly can't think of any

Blood and Sand is a beautifully written autobiography by BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner. Not only does he tell the tale of the terrible attack he and cameraman Simon Cumbers were subjected to in Riyadh, but he tells it with with an incredibly unweakened love for the Middle East. Born in London, Frank Gardner went on to study Arabic Studies at university, before securing himself a well-paid job in banking with many exclusive benefits. Feeling ...
...travel articles he had written as a student and during his early career, recognising that he wanted to become a journalist, and educate the West about the Arabic world. Gardner goes on to tell of his struggle to get in to journalism in his thirties, clinging on to every contact and offering himself for graveyard shifts and jobs noone else wanted. Eventually he climbs through the ranks to BBC Security Correspondent (of which he is the first - he ... Read review

Advantages: Informative, educational, moving first-hand account of the Holocaust
Disadvantages: Would have liked a follow-up section, some apparent innacuracies

...Filip Muller in his book Eyewitness Auschwitz - Three Years in the Gas Chambers. This is the first time I have read someone's first-hand account of working in the gas chambers, and according to this book, he was the only one of the crematorium team to survive and publish his memories. Muller was born in 1922 in Sered, Czechoslovakia and was taken to Auschwitz in April 1942 aged twenty. Being male, young and fit, he was chosen to work in the building ...
...Western Europe in 1969 and Eyewitness Auschwitz was published in 1979. As far as I can tell, Muller is still alive and 85 years old. I can't find a record of his death online anyway. His book is 180 pages long and is split into five chapters, with a glossary and diagrams of the concentration camp and crematorium set up at the end. The first chapter is called No Return and explains how he came to arrive in Auschwitz and his early days there. Into ... Read review

Advantages: Funny, emotional, gripping, interesting
Disadvantages: none!

...about. However I also love Frank Skinner and what. wit him coming from te black country as well (also a cross I have to bare!) then it was a definite must read on my list! This is a totally honest book as honest as you can get, although, pleasingly, I didn't find it full of cringe-worthy moments, just funny and sometimes touching moments which kept me glued to the book all the way through. Frank goes into so much detail about growing up in Oldbury ... Read review

Advantages: Amusing. Easy reading. Will ring true for many teachers.
Disadvantages: Not all comprehensive schools are this bad, honestly.

Angela Mason, the supply teacher who filmed Channel 5’s documentary ‘Classroom Chaos’ was banned from teaching a year for her pains. Frank Chalk — it’s a pseudonym — will escape punishment for this more humorous and more detailed whistle-blow. First I should say that I’m a teacher — not a supply teacher but I’ve often covered lessons for absent colleagues (and some teachers are absent a LOT). A good lesson requires that you know the pupils, are ...
...plan. A supply teacher is lucky if even one of these factors is present. I dread cover lessons. I guess the main reason that I thoroughly enjoyed Frank Chalk’s book is that I empathised with him. Taken together his anecdotes convey the powerlessness and frustration of the supply teacher. Chalk sounds like a reasonable, level-headed kind of person and he does point out some of the benefits of teaching, but overall his view of the education system ... Read review

Advantages: Eye opening
Disadvantages: Heartbreaking and shocking

"Do They Hear You When You Cry" is a true life and modern autobiography of a woman from Togo, Africa, who was forced to flee her homeland and abandoned her family to avoid the customer of Female Gender Mutilation (FGM). I first read of this subject nearly ten years ago, and now, as I think back to that magazine article, and reading the hoorror that our author Fauziya Kassindja faced during the 1990's, I have to wonder if the article I did read was ...
...to her release. Kauziya was born in Togo, a tiny African country which has more loyalty to its long-formed tribes than to its more recently formed country borders. Born to a large family, including several older sisters, Kauziya was doubtless her father's (Yaya) favourites of all his children, being one of the youngest, and female, and likewise she adored him. Both were even more united by the fact that they both suffered from asthma. The family ... Read review