Vet on the Go by Graham Wallace
Category: Biography/Memoir
In February 1945, with no veterinary training available in New Zealand, Graham Wallace braved a German raider in the Tasman Sea to begin his studies in Sydney. The potentially explosive journey setting the tone for a colourful life working with big farm animals in rural New Zealand as a travelling vet, ...Show more
Journeys to the Other Side of the World - Further Adventures of a Young Naturalist by David Attenborough
Category: Biography/Memoir | Reading Level: very good
'a wondrous reminder of Attenborough's pioneering role . . . full of delightful tales' Daily Express 'An adventure that sparked a lifetime's commitment to the planet' The Lady Following the success of the original Zoo Quest expeditions, in the late 1950s onwards the young David Attenborough embarked o ...Show more
Memory Pieces by Maurice Gee
Category: Sale Book
Sdecondhand. Memory Pieces is an intimate and evocative memoir in three parts. `Double Unit' tells the story of Maurice Gee's parents - Lyndahl Chapple Gee, a talented writer who for reasons that become clear never went on with a writing career, and Len Gee, a boxer, builder, and man's man. `Blind Ro ...Show more
The Hills of Chianti: The Story of a Tuscan Winemaking Family in Seven Bottles by Piero Antinori
Category: Biography/Memoir
The head of Italy’s "first family" of winemaking reflects on the Antinoris’ six-hundred-year legacy and a life of good food and drink in the hills of Tuscany. If you know wine, you know the name Antinori. Since 1385, this noble Florentine family has produced some of Italy’s finest wines. The Hills of Ch ...Show more
In the Eye of the Storm: The Autobiography of Sir John Houghton by John Houghton
Category: Biography/Memoir
For John Houghton, the Chief Executive of the Met Office at the time of the Great Storm in 1987, and founding member of the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), childhood curiosity about the natural world led to a quest for answers through science. Inspired by new, excit ...Show more
Mandela: In celebration of a great life by Charlene Smith
Category: Biography/Memoir
The measure of a politician is not in his or her words; spin doctors take care of those. It is in what they do to improve the lives of their people. A successful lawyer, Nelson Mandela sacrificed career, family and freedom to pursue an extravagant ideal: a non-racist, non-sexist future for a nation appa ...Show more
Island Home by Tim Winton
Category: Biography/Memoir
I grew up on the world's largest island.' This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton's beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how this unique landscape has shaped him and his writing. For over thirty years, Winton has written novels in which the natural world is a ...Show more
From the Blitz to the Burmese Jungle & Beyond by Brian Hennessy; Karen McMillan
Category: Biography/Memoir | Reading Level: very good
One man's memoir of World War II which took him from the Blitz to the jungles of Burma, to the devastation of Hiroshima.'I consider myself lucky to have survived the global carnage still myself - a reluctant soldier who had to go to war, who only ever wanted peace for everyone.' Brian HennessyBrian immi ...Show more
Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan
Category: Biography/Memoir | Reading Level: near fine
Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-FictionA New York Times Notable Book of 2015 A painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators - her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the ear ...Show more
Patrick Leigh Fermor - An Adventure by Artemis Cooper
Category: Biography/Memoir | Reading Level: very good
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely acclaimed as the greatest travel writer of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water; he was a self-educated ...Show more
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
Category: Biography/Memoir
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY 2016 WINNER OF THE 2016 WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life. William Finnegan first started surfing ...Show more