Autobiographies

[daveinaustria]

Just wondering what autobiographies are a good read. Ones that stand out for me are Freddy Trueman's and 'Hello!' by the living legend that is Leslie Phillips.

[JPK123]

For football fans, I would highly recommend George Best's "Blessed" and Brian Clough's first autobiography "Clough". Two football greats from on and off the pitch (both in Clough's case) who have a great stories to tell. Must reads.

[Valderie]

A good read for tennis fans is John McEnroe 'Serious' - he's a very intelligent and articulate writer.

[JohnHigginsFan]

I loved Fred Astaire's Steps in Time.

[dannyd0g]

I've only read a handful of autobiographies and most of them were snooker ones, so I'm no expert by any means, but if you are prepared to go back 20 years - Bob Geldof's 'Is That It' is a fantastic read. All about his life up to the first Live Aid concert. How whe turned his life around from being a down and out druggie to someone regularly meeting people like Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles. Truly inspirational stuff.

He really should do a 'part 2' of his life after live Aid as so much has happened in his 20 odd years since then.

[Q Ball]

CHUBBY BROWN - COMMON AS MUCK


Not sport but fantastic

Q

[Alex0paul]

If you like cricket then Shane Warne's autobiography, imaginativly called 'My Autobiography' is a great read.

[Sam147]

The autobiography of famous Soccer referee "Pierluigi Collina" is a very good read, I think the title is "The Rules Of The Game".

[Miss Walker]

Don't know if you are looking for historical figures or not... But these are some Memoires I read, being left with a feeling of "Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh". All descriptions by amazon:

"Running with Scissors" and "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs:

There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all.

Fans of Augusten Burroughs's darkly funny memoir Running with Scissors were left wondering at the end of that book what would become of young Augusten after his squalid and fascinating childhood ended. In Dry, we find that although adult Augusten is doing well professionally, earning a handsome living as an ad writer for a top New York agency, Burroughs's personal life is a disaster. His apartment is a sea of empty Dewar's bottles, he stays out all night boozing, and he dabs cologne on his tongue in an unsuccessful attempt to mask the stench of alcohol on his breath at work. When his employer insists he seek help, Burroughs ships out to Minnesota for detoxification, counseling, and amusingly told anecdotes about the use of stuffed animals in group therapy. But after a month of such treatment, he's back in Manhattan and tenuously sober. And while its one thing to lay off the sauce in rehab, Burroughs learns that it's quite another to resume your former life while avoiding the alcohol that your former life was based around. This quest to remain sober is made dramatically more difficult, and the tale more harrowing, when Burroughs begins an ill-advised romance with a crack addict. Certainly the "recovered alcoholic fighting to stay sober" tale is not new territory for a memoirist. But Burroughs's account transcends clichés: it doesn't adhere to the traditional "temptation narrowly resisted" storyline and it features, in Burroughs himself, a central character that is sympathetic even when he's neither likable nor admirable. But what ultimately makes this memoir such a terrific read is a brilliant and candid sense of humor that manages to stay dry even when recalling events where the author was anything but.


"The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls:

Freelance writer Walls doesn't pull her punches. She opens her memoir by describing looking out the window of her taxi, wondering if she's "overdressed for the evening" and spotting her mother on the sidewalk, "rooting through a Dumpster." Walls's parents—just two of the unforgettable characters in this excellent, unusual book—were a matched pair of eccentrics, and raising four children didn't conventionalize either of them. Her father was a self-taught man, a would-be inventor who could stay longer at a poker table than at most jobs and had "a little bit of a drinking situation," as her mother put it. With a fantastic storytelling knack, Walls describes her artist mom's great gift for rationalizing. Apartment walls so thin they heard all their neighbors? What a bonus—they'd "pick up a little Spanish without even studying." Why feed their pets? They'd be helping them "by not allowing them to become dependent." While Walls's father's version of Christmas presents—walking each child into the Arizona desert at night and letting each one claim a star—was delightful, he wasn't so dear when he stole the kids' hard-earned savings to go on a bender. The Walls children learned to support themselves, eating out of trashcans at school or painting their skin so the holes in their pants didn't show. Buck-toothed Jeannette even tried making her own braces when she heard what orthodontia cost. One by one, each child escaped to New York City. Still, it wasn't long before their parents appeared on their doorsteps. "Why not?" Mom said. "Being homeless is an adventure."