After the early newspaper reviews of Clive James's new memoir, North Face of Soho, now we start to get the longer, dare I say "more considered", reviews in the journals and magazines. Such a review is Christopher Hitchens's in "The Times Literary Supplement": "The great Peter De Vries, when asked about the nature of his ambition, replied that he yearned for a mass audience that would be large enough for his elite audience to despise. In this latest volume of his tragicomic autobiography, Clive James admits twice to a similar aspiration."
Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang gets a brief mention by Ann on the "Bibliog" weblog, which includes links to the Sacramento Public Library catalog. "Carey chose to tell the story from Kelly's point of view, mimicking the style of Kelly's own writings, as preserved in the Jerilderie Letter, for example. Once you get past the unusual and colloquial language, the images he draws of life in those times are riveting and appalling."
In the "Bulletin" magazine, it's all cricket books as far as the eye can see: Ashley Hay just lists them; Gideon Haigh looks at Records are Made to be Broken: The Real Story of Bill Ponsford by John Leckey; and Andrew Stafford probes a bit deeper - but not much - into Captain's Diary 2006 by Ricky Ponting and Silent Revolutions by Gideon Haigh. Well, Haigh couldn't review his own book, could he?
