Biographies
Beware of the dog
Title: Beware of the dog
Author: Brian Moore
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
RRP: £8.99
One cannot fail to be moved by the opening chapter of this autobiography, in which England Rugby legend, Brian Moore describes his early childhood, which includes his accounts of adoption and child abuse. His descriptions are frank, open and largely described in a way which leaves the reader to make their own sense of them. This chapter not only sets the backdrop for his life but also the style of the remaining chapters. Moore talks throughout the book about his inner demon (which he calls Gollum) the inner voice that constantly criticises and demeans the self. It’s a reminder that people who achieve super-human things are still only human; they have the same irrational fears and beliefs as the rest of us. At times the critical voice has led Moore to take challenge head-on, to compete and to spur him on to greatness, at other times, it has had a debilitating effect with more self-destructive consequences, ultimately leading to regrets and missed opportunities.
One gets the impression that ‘compromise’ is not a word that features heavily in Moore’s vocabulary. His style is open, honest and full. He forms opinions, (some of which, particularly about other people) are unequivocal and tough. If sometimes he might be accused of making an equivalence between truth, fact and opinion, what you get with Moore is a simple honesty. It’s a ‘publish and be damned’ approach which says, ‘This is me, take it or leave it’. It’s also very refreshing and he does it in the full knowledge that he will be judged by others and that some of his comments may hurt people that he cares about. That is not to say that Moore is somehow stuck in a particular ‘world view’. One of the themes that run through the book is his continuing re-interpretation of his history. On many occasions he compares his conclusions of events in life with previous accounts written in a previous biography. History is constantly renegotiated and affects who we are today.
The middle chapters of the book are unsurprisingly, mainly about rugby and his rise to elite status, despite the inner voice telling him that he will never be worthy of such a position. These chapters show in graphic detail the emotions and pressures experienced by elite sportsmen and women. They have jobs that most of us dream about, but that doesn’t mean that they are without a downside. One example is how he describes the infighting, disagreements and political manoeuvrings that accompany high-level sport. One shouldn’t be surprised as these things go on in all organisations, but somehow there is an assumption that when facing a challenge as compelling as winning a World Cup there would be automatic alignment behind such a goal. Moore shows how all these things still have to be worked through and how the extreme physical demands are not the only work to be done, a great deal of effort also has to go into forging a team from talented individuals. Games are described in a way which captures the emotional and physical demands, plus an insight into some of the finer technical points of forward play, often with typical rugby-humour. Without doubt he shows the brutality of top-class rugby – no place to show weakness, where any soft point will be mercilessly exploited by the opposition.
It is in the closing chapters that there is a return to understanding the man. His retirement from sport, and post-career experiences are explored with the same openness and he re-assesses what sport has meant to him over the years. He takes time to reflect on how sport and his personal identity have been inextricably linked, how it has affected relationships (good and bad) and the sheer emotional impact of sport. It is in these chapters (which include an account of searching for his birth mother) that show the ongoing process of reflection, re-interpretation and re-invention. For someone who had a reputation for ‘fronting up’, of relishing the fight and never backing down, this book shows a man with enormous insight and sensitivity, and above all the strength to show his vulnerability. An absolutely fascinating read.
Dreams of my father
Title: Dreams of my Father
Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Cannon Gate
RRP: £9.99
After a year in office and an almost immediate turnaround in the nations favour Barack Obama has a great deal to live up to. More than the usual politician’s promises and policies, the first black president of the most prominent county in the world held the trust, desires and dreams of a nation. So, apart from the amazing use of social networking and viral marketing throughout his presidential campaign what brought this man to this position?
‘Dreams of My Father’ was written by Obama during his time at Harvard Law School and charts the route of the internal battle to establish who he was, how he fitted into the world and what he was destined to do.
The son of a prominent yet absent African father and an American mother, whose values and beliefs were predominantly born from his grandparents who provided the family security and stability throughout his youth.
The honest account of his early work in Chicago, working for a non-profit business as a community organiser in the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the city's South Side, gave first-hand experience of deprivation, poverty and hope. The politics of getting things done and financing change at a local level possibly influencing his unpopular Health Reform that opposition have suggested will cause the end of his presidency.
While the argument of “are leaders born or made” rolls on, in this book Obama describes his personal experiences and the choices he made along the way.
To achieve recognition as the world leader who delivered social change he will need to do more than sell his vision at election and hold onto it while opposition is so huge, I’m looking forward to gaining insight through his second book “The Audacity of Hope” of what drives his ‘thoughts of reclaiming the American Dream’.
Once in a house of fire
Title: Once in a House on Fire
Author: Andrea Ashworth
Publisher: Picador
RRP: £10.99
Set in the 1970’s this is Andrea Ashworth’s account of her early childhood. Ashworth allows us to see the dilemmas faced by a loving family whose Mother makes choices which unwittingly continue the cycle of deprivation and abuse. An account of the struggle in bringing up three girls with the highs and lows of a changing father figure and the way the family adapted to each individual and situation.
Moving around and living with family and friends until an opportunity to start a ‘new life’ in Canada, the morning of departure allowing for a small moment of intimacy between mother and daughter before the rest of the family woke, “then she slid her hands across the table and took up both of mine in her warm palms. Stoking my fists, she unfolded my long olive fingers against the laminated white of the table. We sat quietly together, my mother tracing around each of my fingers, pausing at the knuckles, until the milk van came rattling bottles outside the window to break the spell”. The apparently small gestures that can mean so much, passed off as inconsequential, but to a child torn between secrecy and honesty they can be a lifeline to something better.
Breaking point brought return to the UK after another failed and abusive relationship. “My stepfather was sitting on the kitchen floor, in all the exhausted chaos, holding his face in his hands and moaning. When the strange men came in from outside, he looked up and wiped his nose. Blood was beginning to crust in his hair. ‘That’s my Dad’, I explained. My mother moved out of the corner where she had been sheltering Laurie and Sarah, braced behind a table for his next move. ‘I’m sorry Officer, she said, I’m afraid we’ve wasted your time. We’re working things out for ourselves”.
This return only possible down to a pair of dangly diamond earrings and a ruby ring sent by Ashworth’s Gran, “from miles away in gorgeous loopy writing Gran was begging Mum to sell up and fly”, “The heirlooms got us on to a Boeing 747 that seemed to hum in the sky for days, before it shuddered down in Manchester at the dead of night”.
The book causes you to consider how many other families are experiencing the effects of poverty, abuse and depression while the world carries on unknowing within their own cocooned lives. Oddly Ashworth’s memoir is uplifting, demonstrating love and continual forgiveness, it shows how her family looked out for one another and worked towards creating something better for themselves and their own families.
I hadn’t realised until the end that I was suspended whilst I read, almost holding my breath with the tension and willing a positive end. It’s a book that makes you grateful for what you have, more aware of those around you and what they may be experiencing behind closed doors and a good reminder to never make assumptions about others. A superb and disturbing read but one that is highly recommended.
Racing through the dark
Title: Racing Through the Dark
Author: David Millar with Jeremy Whittle
RRP: £10.99
Publisher: Orion Books
Sometimes, no matter what else you have done with your life, there can be one moment, one decision, that comes to define what your past has been and your future can be. From that moment, everything you do is interpreted and weighed by others against the constant backdrop of that one decision. For David Millar, that moment was the decision to take performance-enhancing drugs. His biography has as its theme the use of drugs in competitive cycling and David’s own struggle with resisting temptation. It is a frank, and at times, brutal account of what some people will do in the pursuit of winning. Although it seems that all of David’s life has been re-evaluated in terms of his relationship to drug-taking, what is remarkable is what he has done since he was caught. If, like me, you start with the idea that any form of drug-taking in sport is cheating, this book will challenge you. Things are never as black or white and if by the end of the book you do not have sympathy with Millar’s plight, you will certainly have greater understanding. (If you want to have a quick insight into why drug-taking in sport is not as clear-cut as you might first imagine, read the chapter Perfection Point).
Make no mistake, even without drugs David Millar was one of GB’s greatest cyclists, in a time before cycling in the UK was the ‘sexy’ sport it is today. It was a time when it was much harder to break into the elite band of cyclists that raced in Europe and to compete in the Tour de France. Furthermore, Millar started out his career as ‘clean’ and an ardent anti-drug athlete. So what happened? One of the areas of study in psychology is the notion of the ‘self’. There are many different perspectives on this and two that help to explain Millar’s story are the humanistic and social constructionist. In the humanist approach, the self is seen as autonomous, self-determining and responsible for their own actions. A ‘Just Say No’ campaign to drugs comes from this perspective – we only need strength of will to resist. The social constructionist approach has a more blurred approach to the self. We are in part defined by the people around us, the culture in which we work and the pressures placed upon us by others. From this approach, we cannot be held entirely responsible for our decisions. And Millar’s book reads like a personal battle between his own individuality and that of what others want him to be. Pressures from other racers, lack of support from governing bodies, a culture of drug-taking within his team, others simply turning a blind eye. Inevitably the pressure builds to a point where Millar gives in and takes EPO, a drug which produces enormous leaps in performance. The subsequent fall from grace is both rapid and deep, and Millar explains in graphic detail the consequences of his actions. And he did pay. Nearly bankrupt, banned from his sport for two years and from the Olympic games for life, plus always being known as someone who cheated. And yet his story is one of redemption. What David Millar has done to eradicate drugs from sport since his comeback is inspiring. His central point is a powerful one: it is not enough to rely on the mental strength of the individual athlete to just say ‘No’. If the culture of the sport in which he/she competes is one where drug-taking is acceptable, then there needs to be an active counter-culture which supports and assists athletes in staying clean. And he has done much to create this counter-culture, pressing for tighter controls within cycling, setting up his own team run on ‘clean’ principles and even being an adviser to WADA on drug-taking in sport. In our country, we tend to want our drug-taking athletes to go away; we don’t want to be reminded that we once thought of them as heroes. But what David Millar has done is to show that something good can come from a bad decision. The personal costs to him have been great, but the potential benefits to future athletes may be greater. You cannot help admire a man who stood up and took responsibility for his actions, rather than offering endless denials and excuses as others before him have done. You may find this a challenging read, because it presses a lot of buttons, but stick with it, it will make you reconsider your own views on why athletes sometimes cross the line. And there is a message in there for all of us.
Download the PDF
Stieg Larsson, My Friend
Title: Stieg Larsson, My Friend
Author: Kurdo Baksi
Publisher: Maclehose Press
RRP: £7.99
Made famous by the Millennium trilogy, the author Stieg Larsson died in 2004 at the age of 50 before the books were ever published. In this book Kurdo Baksi his best friend, describes what drove the man and the back drop to Larsson’s eventual outstanding success as an acclaimed author.
During Larsson’s career as a journalist he was a crucial protagonist in the battle against racism and democracy in Sweden and in Europe and one of the co-founders of the anti-fascist magazine Expo.
The book describes that he was ‘a tireless hero in the fight against racism – there was no battle for democracy and equality that he was unwilling to take part in. He was aware that there was a high price to pay attached to doing so, but it was a price he was prepared to pay. The constant threats , the lack of financial resources and the sleepless nights. It was a struggle that shaped his whole life’.
The magazine Expo was one of the most important projects of Larsson’s life which was founded in 1995 as a result of his belief that it was essential to create a Swedish version of Searchlight. Due to the increasing popularity of the Swedish Democratic Party Larsson felt compelled to act, the established parliamentary parties weren’t sure of how to deal with it and had washed their hands of the party as an aberration, but one that grew bigger and in 2006 the Swedish Democrats won 281 local council seats. Expo’s remit is ‘to study and survey anti-democratic, right wing extremist and racial tendencies in Swedish society. All activities are idealistic and non-profit making. The foundations policy is to safeguard democracy and freedom of expression against racist, right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic and totalitarian tendencies in society.’
I have to admit that I was drawn to read this book after reading the beautifully written and complex plots and inter plots of the trilogy, (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl that Played with Fire, The Girl that kicked the Hornet’s Nest) first published in 2005, 2006 and 2007 respectively, and subsequently being astounded at the real story that lay behind the authors inspiration.
It caused me to consider, what have I stood up for and against in the pursuit of equality and the greater good in my life? When we see atrocities in the media do we sit back and think that would never happen and that of course we would step in if we saw the same treatment of others in ‘our own back yard’.
Whilst in business we may not directly exposed to the type of extremes Larsson fought to uncover, speaking out and standing up for what is just and fair takes courage and bravery. Along with that, it’s the sensitivity and ability to handle the conflict and potential fallout that may ensue. The longer issues are left; often the more difficult they are to manage.
In closing I would say this book gets you to question yourself and delve into your own personal value system whilst being a heart wrenching farewell from a friend, thoroughly recommended.