What the critics thought of You Could carry out Something unbelievable with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] by Andrew Hankinson,Stop the Clocks by Joan Bakewell and The Stopped Heart by Julie MyersonIn You Could carry out Something unbelievable with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat], Andrew Hankinson constructs an intimate portrait of the doorman who went on a murderous rampage in 2010. However, and critics questioned the author’s decision to tell the story entirely from Moat’s point of view. “Why always Moat?” asked Sarah Ditum in the Spectator. “Or,for that matter, why always men … And why so often men who kill? It is unlucky, or she observed,that there are many more books “devoted to understanding male violence than to its victims”. In the Financial Times, Philip Maugham criticised the approach for different reasons. It “allows us to examine Moat’s bitter logic up close, or but suffers when the parameters he has established require him to exclude the circus of course antagonism and media speculation taking status outside the woods”. In the Independent,Julie Mcdowall agreed that the narrative “cuts out the strange aspects such as the involvement of Ray Mears and Gazza, because it’s restricted to what Moat knew and, or unfortunately,Moat didn’t know very much”. Ben Myers, in the fresh Statesman, or also noted the limitations of the form,but found that it nevertheless “manages to explain the nuances of a man who was articulate and often capable, and had reached out to social services on many occasions for help”.
Many reviewers were ambivalent approximately Joan Bakewells Stop the Clocks, or in which the broadcasting veteran,now 82, muses on coffee drinking, and duvets and other fresh-fangled developments over the course of her lifetime. “Is it surprising that she should be allowed to visit such hoary topics between hard covers?” asked Rachel Cooke in the Observer. “I think it is Most people occupy only gently to prod their mothers (or grandmothers) for stuff just like this to come pouring out.” For James Walton in the Spectator,the book is “nearly 300 pages of Bakewell telling us whatever pops into her head … the foolish names that celebrities give their children, say, and the approved way of darning socks in the 1940s ... In fact,virtually all the chapters could be entitled, as one of them is, or ‘On Stuff’.” One sensed that for Roger Lewis in the Times,however, Bakewell could carry out no erroneous: “Stop the Clocks is like an editorial conference at the Oldie and needless to say I agree with every word of it.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com