Paris

Lists all the major attractions (The Louvre, The Eiffel Tower, The Arc De Triomphe, etc.), often accompanied by small, color photos. The list of recommended accomodations is extremely small, and limited mostly to upper/middle range hotels. The "where to eat" lists were very disappointing -- mostly chain family burger restaurants. I need to travel all the way to Paris to eat McDonalds?

Gives the basics, but not much more. I found "Paris for Families" by Larry Lain [ISBN:1-56656-360-7] to be much more helpful, especially in regards to visiting Paris on a budget.

If you are familiar with other Cadogan guides, this is a little bit of a departure from the usual style, but just as recommendable.

This book contains a wealth of information for parents, and older kids, planning their trip to Paris. There are sections on the main tourist areas of he city, eg the Latin Quarter, which include the attractions most likely to appeal to children (never neglecting the 'Big Sites'), including museums, and especially parks and playgrounds, shopping relevant to kids, and best of all, family friendly eating places in each quarter, including opening hours, an indication of price, and some specialties/type of fare.

There are sections on entertainment, sports and activities, shopping, eating and sleeping. One useful chapter is on 'Themed' days out - eg On the trail of the French Revolution, Paris from below, Paris from above - always with food stop suggestions.

The latter part of the book is devoted to Disneyland Paris, which provides comprehensive information if you are planning to visit there.

One negative: the maps aren't all that useful for actual navigation. They do give an indication of the relative location of different places of interest in each geographical area, and show metro locations so are useful for planning your itinerary. But the streets are not named and you may need an accompanying, more comprehensive map.

No hesitation about recommending this book, and I am using it in conjunction with Fodor's Around Paris With Kids (reviewed elsewhere).

While this book covers all the bases for a trip to Paris with children, I found the most useful section to be the extended chapters on Disneyland-Paris. The Disneyland park is huge (1/5th the size of Paris) and this guide helped us quickly prioritize where to go and what to do based on the ages and interests of our children.

(And it's really written with all the good taste left to literature by the very beginning of the twentieth century... It's a classic, about the struggle between civilization and the beast we call man.)

"He panted through his open mouth. And he felt his tongue, the short and bulky tongue of man, begin to flatten and lengthen. "God help me!" he cried. But now the tongue was curling out of his mouth, was hanging over his teeth. Unable to resist any more,he sprang from his bed. He went to a corner of his room, muzzled under a piece of cloth and dragged forth an arm, a human arm. The last of the two arms he had taken from La belle Normade.

He sank his teeth into it. His eyes glared around suspiciously. Low growls came from his throat. For a while there was silence, then there were more noises, the slap of a hard dead hand as it hit the floor, the crunching a of bone, and occasionally a sharp tick as a ring on one finger struck the wood."

*****************

"Aymar soon discovered that he was talking nonsense. The Commune shot fifty-seven from the prison of La Roquette. Versailles retaliated with nineteen hundred. To that comparison add this one. The whole famous Reign of Terror in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists executed 20,000 commoners before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficincy of guillotine and modern rifle, or the comparitive cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?

Bertrand, it now semed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! "And there'll be worse," he thought and again he had that marvelous rising of the heart. Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!"

This is my all-time favorite novel. I've read it so many times, I've lost track. When I first read it, I couldn't believe it wasn't a nineteenth century French novel, and that author Guy Endore was a twentieth century American.

Werewolf is the odyssey of born pariah Bertrand Caillet, a werewolf in spite of himself. Every life he touches suffers, whether he means it to or not. He rifles graves for sustenance during his lycanthropic episodes, and conceals his identity by becoming a French soldier during the Franco-Prussian War and the Communard uprising. He even finds the one woman whose love might save him, an equally bizarre but oddly touching Jewish outcast named Sophie with decidedly S&M tastes.

The novel is many things, not the least of which is episodic. It's a love story, a war story, a tragedy, and an absurdist comedy, by turns. It's grotesquely funny, and hilariously terrifying. Most of all, it's a mature social satire, and just an incredibly damn good read.

Crime of crimes, this magnificent literary masterpiece has once again fallen out of print. Seek it out in the used book bins, until some publisher manages to rediscover it and put it back on the shelves of your local bookstore.

Authors are painters -- little fellas that you invite into your mind who then proceed to paint pictures on the walls of your brain. Some pictures are pretty. Others are visions of horror so twisted and evil that we can only whisper the descriptions. If you read this book, Guy Endore will kick open the front door of your mind and start painting the most horrific, intoxicating, and disturbing pictures imaginable. Endore uses all of the paints too - suspense, gore, crimes against nature, murder - you name it, it's in there.

WARNING - There is history. Aw geeze, do I have to? Don't worry, it will help give depth to the dementia.

WARNING - This book is often shocking. There were moments in this book when I actually started talking to myself aloud. "No. No, he didn't. Tell me he didn't just do what I think he did. No way. (Man, this book is messed-up.)"

WARNING - Pregnant women, small children, and people who can not control their bladders should not read this book.

In my mind, I see a little guy. Occasionally, he looks back at the pictures that Endore painted. You see, the little guy can't decide if he should paint over these gory masterpieces or keep them. It's just wishful thinking though. The little guy knows these images aren't going away. There's no scrapping away these paints. Poor little fella is stuck with them. Lucky guy.

"Beat Writers at Work" is a fascinating and informative collection of interviews with writers and publishers of the so-called "Beat Generation". I consciously use the term "Beat Generation", rather than "Beat Movement", because the collection incorporates a diverse group of poets and writers who, while largely contemporaries, are each so idiosyncratic in their own right that it is inaccurate to lump them together in a single "movement". All of the interviews originally appeared in "The Paris Review" between 1965 and 1998. Each interview is preceded by a short biographical introduction and a description of the circumstances in which the interview occurred.

If there is any unifying characteristic among these writers, it is their rejection of literary formalism and their reliance upon sponaneity. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti observerves in his 1998 interview, one of the best in this collection, "I would call it the 'graph of consciousness' school of poetry because the poetry, as conceived and as defined in this manner, is exactly what goes through your consciousness at any given moment."

Consistent with Ferlinghetti's view of the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg thus proclaims in his 1996 interview, that "there should be no distinction between what we write down and what we really know." Attacking literary formalism, the owlish iconoclastic "Howl" author notes: "the hypocrisy of literature has been-you know like there's supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different from . . . in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our quotidian inspired lives."

Not surprisingly, Ginsberg's poetics echo the 1968 interview with Jack Kerouac, the breathless unpunctuated Beat proponent of unrevised prose, the very inventor of the term "Beat". In Kerouac's words, "by not revising what you've already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your thoughts about events in your unchangeable way."

Charles Olson, whose virtually unintelligible 1970 interview appears here, follows this same poetic line. Olson (more appropriately identified with the "Black Mountain School") advocated so-called "open-field composition", described by George Plimpton in his introduction to the Olson interview as "poetry whose appearance and internal logic are governed by the spontaneity of the writing process."

Thus, in some respects, Beat poetics seems to resemble the spontaneity, the anti-formalism of Surrealist automatic writing (something which Ferlinghetti suggests in his interview). But this resemblance is attenuated by the Beat experience of America and of the Beats turn to the East (specifically, Buddhism) and to the influence of consciousness-expanding drugs. Furthermore, while there may be unifying strands running through Beat poetics, this collection of interviews also demonstrates the remarkable diversity of these authors, a diversity which makes it difficult to collate their writings under any unified theory. After reading the interviews with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, a reader is enthralled and exasperated at the eclection of thought among them.

"Beat Writers at Work" contains exceptional interviews with Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Paul Bowles, and Ken Kesey. These interviews make this collection required reading for anyone interested in the Beats. The interviews with Ferlinghetti and Barney Rosset also provide an insightful look at the role of City Lights Books and Grove Press in publishing the Beats in their early days, a time when censorship made such publication a financially parlous venture for small presses. Finally, Elissa Schappell, a contributing editor of "The Paris Review", provides a fascinating memoir of a graduate class taught by Ginsberg in 1995. The only weak pieces in this collection are the 1980 "conversation" among Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Russian poet Andrei Vosnesensky and the largely unintelligible wordplay of Charles Olson's 1970 interview. There is also one notable author missing: Gregory Corso, who is, in Ferlinghetti's words, "the most important Beat poet after Ginsberg."

"Beat Writers at Work" is a fascinating and informative collection of interviews with writers and publishers of the so-called "Beat Generation". I consciously use the term "Beat Generation", rather than "Beat Movement", because the collection incorporates a diverse group of poets and writers who, while largely contemporaries, are each so idiosyncratic in their own right that it is inaccurate to lump them together in a single "movement". All of the interviews originally appeared in "The Paris Review" between 1965 and 1998. Each interview is preceded by a short biographical introduction and a description of the circumstances in which the interview occurred.

If there is any unifying characteristic among these writers, it is their rejection of literary formalism and their reliance upon sponaneity. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti observerves in his 1998 interview, one of the best in this collection, "I would call it the 'graph of consciousness' school of poetry because the poetry, as conceived and as defined in this manner, is exactly what goes through your consciousness at any given moment."

Consistent with Ferlinghetti's view of the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg thus proclaims in his 1996 interview, that "there should be no distinction between what we write down and what we really know." Attacking literary formalism, the owlish iconoclastic "Howl" author notes: "the hypocrisy of literature has been-you know like there's supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed to be different from . . . in subject, in diction and even in organization, from our quotidian inspired lives."

Not surprisingly, Ginsberg's poetics echo the 1968 interview with Jack Kerouac, the breathless unpunctuated Beat proponent of unrevised prose, the very inventor of the term "Beat". In Kerouac's words, "by not revising what you've already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your thoughts about events in your unchangeable way."

Charles Olson, whose virtually unintelligible 1970 interview appears here, follows this same poetic line. Olson (more appropriately identified with the "Black Mountain School") advocated so-called "open-field composition", described by George Plimpton in his introduction to the Olson interview as "poetry whose appearance and internal logic are governed by the spontaneity of the writing process."

Thus, in some respects, Beat poetics seems to resemble the spontaneity, the anti-formalism of Surrealist automatic writing (something which Ferlinghetti suggests in his interview). But this resemblance is attenuated by the Beat experience of America and of the Beats turn to the East (specifically, Buddhism) and to the influence of consciousness-expanding drugs. Furthermore, while there may be unifying strands running through Beat poetics, this collection of interviews also demonstrates the remarkable diversity of these authors, a diversity which makes it difficult to collate their writings under any unified theory. After reading the interviews with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, a reader is enthralled and exasperated at the eclection of thought among them.

"Beat Writers at Work" contains exceptional interviews with Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Paul Bowles, and Ken Kesey. These interviews make this collection required reading for anyone interested in the Beats. The interviews with Ferlinghetti and Barney Rosset also provide an insightful look at the role of City Lights Books and Grove Press in publishing the Beats in their early days, a time when censorship made such publication a financially parlous venture for small presses. Finally, Elissa Schappell, a contributing editor of "The Paris Review", provides a fascinating memoir of a graduate class taught by Ginsberg in 1995. The only weak pieces in this collection are the 1980 "conversation" among Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Russian poet Andrei Vosnesensky and the largely unintelligible wordplay of Charles Olson's 1970 interview. There is also one notable author missing: Gregory Corso, who is, in Ferlinghetti's words, "the most important Beat poet after Ginsberg."

The Paris Reviw interviews of the beats are famouse for their openness about the writers craft, and the insight into their work and lives. If you want to truly understand the beats, this is the place to go! Totally worth it!

Eugene Atget (1857-1927) spent almost thirty years photographing details of often inconspicuous Parisian buildings, side streets, cul-de-sacs, and public sculptures. In Focus: Eugene Atget brings together more than 50 of the J. Paul Getty Museum's 295 photographs by Atget, with commentary on each image by associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum, Gordon Baldwin. Atget's photograph and Baldwin's commentary are enhanced with a chronological overview of Atget's life and an edited transcript of a colloquium on his career. In Focus: Eugene Atget is a superbly presented and invaluable contribution to the history of photography.

Eugene Atget (1857-1927) is the undisputed photo-documentarian of 19th century Paris. With studious attention to detail, Atget seemingly photographed every intimate corner of his much-loved city. Leaving the well-known monuments and boulevards to others, Atget instead concentrated on the atmospheric fabric of everyday Paris, photographing shops and window displays, cobbled streets, doorways, stairways, vehicles, churches, amusement parks, street-peddlers and prostitutes.

Unraveling the mystery of Eugène Atget's life and work is easier said than done. Now considered to be one of history's most important photographers, Atget was relatively unknown during his lifetime. Posthumously famous for his photographs, Atget in fact made only a humble living selling his prints to architects, artists, and institutions.

Atget wrote in 1920, "I may say that I have in my possession all of Old Paris." His systematic method of photographing Paris street by street is spellbinding, and the result is a detailed catalogue of 19th century Paris. The result of Eugène Atget's life's work is gathered here in a heartbreakingly beautiful book for lovers of Paris, architecture, and photography.

I received this book as a gift because not only do I collect photography books but I also frequently go to Paris because I love the city. This book is full of full page photos of Paris in the past and has a dreamy quality of the day to day events and sites of Paris and the surrounding areas. It's a great collectible book for photography fans and Paris lovers.

Daniel Young has two different purposes at work in this book, and they don't always seem to go together so well. On the one hand, he wants to give us a representative sampling of café cuisine, so we can recreate at home the tastes and smells of the Paris café experience. And here, I think, he succeeds admirably.

At the same time, however, he is also attempting to present us with something of a portrait of café culture -- a celebration, in the words of the introduction, "of what makes this institution so worth preserving." No less, the author hopes that after reading his book, we "should be prepared to choose a regular Parisian café to call your own." Frankly, I don't think he achieves this second goal nearly so well.

This book is divided, in standard cookbook fashion, by categories of food -- appetizers, entrees, and so on. Cafés are presented within each section based on the representative recipe Young has chosen from its menu. If more than one selection comes from a given café, however, they appear on different pages, sometimes widely separated. While the virtue of this approach is unmistakable for a cookbook, it does make it a bit more difficult to consider any given café.

While the writing about each café is generally pretty good, I didn't find the text-heavy layout and two-color photography particularly inviting. And for a book that's supposed to help us choose a café or two of our own, I was very disappointed that there were so few photos ... and that the ones that there were, were so often less than evocative. If Daniel Young's descriptive writing could be combined with the wonderful photography of Marie-France Boyer's "The French Café" (Thames & Hudson, 1994), *that* would be a book to treasure.

In all, your opinion of this book will be colored by what you hope to get out of it. If, like some of the other reviewers on this page, you want to cook authentic and memorable café offerings in your own home, then this is probably just what you're looking for. But if you're searching for something that captures the mystique and romance of the café culture, then "The Paris Café Cookbook," while unquestionably a good start in that direction, will still leave a bit more to be desired.

The recipes from the book are truly delightful. I've made several of them over the past two years. This book is well-written and does justice to a cook outside France, by providing reasonable substitutions. Once while in Paris, I decided to compare the recipe results against the actual dishes at the cafes in the book. Surprisingly, the food tasted and looked very similar. The desserts are especially delicious - Mousse au Chocolat, Profiteroles au Chocolat, Peach Cake with Strawberry Sauce, Creme Brulee, Pear Clafoutis ... ummm!

I live in Paris and know hundreds of restaurants, but Dan Young's wonderful book has led me to wonderful places I never would have found, or have passed by dozens of times without a thought of going inside. I've never had a bad meal with Mr. Young's book, and every new choice is an adventure. As he says in his introdion: finding a greate expensive restaurant is easy, but finding value and wonderful food is a real art. Eat well!

The Paris Connection was a fabulous story. It was definitely one of the best Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys Super Mysteries. It was probably one of the more difficult books in figuring out who the bad guy was. I liked how this time there was two separate mysteries instead of one intertwined one. Sometimes they try too hard to make the mysteries intertwined and it does not work out as well and in this case having two separate mysteries worked out perfectly. They both had to deal with the Rock Star's tour but they had two different culprits. I think that the bad guy was also pretty hard to figure out and I had no idea who it was until the very end. It is always nice to have a surprise at the end of a good book! I recommend this if you like Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys!

I really like mysteries and I love Paris. However, this book didn't explain the character Jules well enough. If you like this series read this book!

Nancy and the Hardy Boys are at it again solving another mystery

Amid the common presumptuous indulgence to paris's irresistable romanic aroma this book delivers the bitter reality of life. A book that engulfs many existing but hidden dilemma in the city of love that many of us are just unaware of. A good read but not something that will lift your christmas spirit.

I was a Creative Writing student of Richard Teleky's not too long ago. Of course, as soon the novel was available, I rushed out to purchase it, and do no regret doing so. Teleky executes a wondrous ability to shape and reveal his characters through the minutiae of commonplace events, rich dialogue and psychological self-probing. In other words, he is able to take a complex personality and nail it down by a single sentence. Not many writers are capable of such a literary feat.

Again and again Richard has proven to me - and to many of his students, both previous and recent - that his talent for writing itself is best shared not only with young aspiring writers, but with the world in its entirey.

I've read the book three times, and I bought it in hardcover to reread again. I just loved it. Rosie and her sister, her boyfriend Serge, their friends, Benyoub and his cousin, the streets of Paris, the worries Rosie has, the countryside scenes, are so realistic. I read the book, then a year later, I made my first trip to Paris. How Teleky described Paris was so exact, although very, and beautifully, subtle. I felt that I knew where I was. We stayed in the Marais district and felt I'd been there. We walked through the district where Rosie lived, and I knew where I was. I bought the book for my sister and she loved it, too. I'll give it as a gift again. I wish Richard Teleky would write more fiction.

i recently returned from my first trip to paris. in preparation, i reviewed multiple guidebooks and took with me two. the four i considered most promising were let's go paris, rough guide paris, frommers paris from $90 and fodors paris. it was frustrating that i could not find a comparative review of guides which is why i share this info with you.

of these, after the trip, i must say that let's go paris was the most helpful with copious useful maps and tips, in addition to accurate and abundant recommendations on housing, dining and entertainment. frommers was the second most useful in planning and understanding the city.

although i thought that the rough guide would be beneficial, the maps were limited in detail and annotation. also, dining etc was not listed by arrondissements which made searching very difficult.

fodors was nice, but not particularly useful for the moderate income traveler compared to the others. frommers paris i briefly reviewed but found much less useful than the other frommers guide.

This is the best guidebook for Paris (in my opinion) for people who want hotel and restaurant recommendations and are interested in a bit of background history of the city. This book (and previous editions) have been my companions during several Paris trips over the past 13 years. This book introduced me to my favorite Paris restaurant, a place to which we return every time we are in town.

I am a guide book and travel fanatic and I generally buy and read a number of guide books for whatever destination I have in mind. I am also a Paris-phile and have been to Paris 5 times in the past 13 years for both business and pleasure.

This book stands out as the best for my demographic, the professional age 20 - 40 crowd.

The book stands above other travel books particularly in its hotel, bar, club and restaurant recommendations and is worthwhile for these alone. It also provides some fantastic historical insight into Paris, particularly with regards to 20th century Parisian history.

It is printed on a pulpy paper and is very light, something to keep in mind if you are just packing a single bag and taking off to Paris for the weekend.

This book is a very good *scientific* biography of Einstein. This is both its strength and weakness. It is a strength because the author is clearly very knowledgeable about the subject, and therefore I couldn't think of a better book than this one. However, to appreciate the ins and outs of the scientific work of Einstein, you need to be a scientist yourself, or at least be very interested in the subject, because Pais does not avoid technical discussions. Not at all.

Therefore, for people without knowledge on this level, the book is not so accessible (I think), which may lead to disappointments. However, for this group of readers there is also good news: the author has organized the book into two interwoven 'sections': a part that is purely biographical and contains no technical discussions, and a technical part. The two parts are easily recognizable in the table of contents. This makes the book interesting and useful for a broad public.

Summarizing: this high quality book makes no light reading, but it is worth the effort, and the money.

that is what Einstein had to say, when in 1921 he was confronted with rumours that a non-zero aether drift had been discovered by Dayton Miller, a one-time junior of Albert Michaelson. When asked what he meant by this, he remarked "Nature hides her secrets because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse". He is also said to have opined that he had "not for a moment taken [Miller's results] seriously". That was the kind of faith that Albert Einstein had in the laws of Nature that he discovered...a deep faith not capable of rational foundation..

Albert Einstein...the man...the philosopher...the scientist...the physicist...the humanist...the legend...so much has already been written about this one extraordinary human being, that you can be forgiven for grimacing when you see this book and thinking, 'oh, no ! not another one in this never-ending craze'...but think again...this is THE definitive scientific biography of Herr Professor Einstein, coming as it is from a physicist who was close to this great man towards the end of his life. Abraham Pais does a superb job of presenting the state of physics before Einstein, how he changed that and how it has evolved since his times. Science was Einstein's life, his devotion, his refuge, and his source of detachment...Science was his religion...In order to understand the man, then, it is necessary to follow his scientific ways of thinking and doing...and that is what the book precisely does...

One more thing...this is not a layman's book...if you have only a little idea of physics, and are averse to mathematical details, then look elsewhere...this is not for you...but if you have that 'holy curiosity' and 'wonderment of the spectacle that is science', with loads of perseverance, this book does an excellent job of satisfying that quest...it can inspire you to seek greater heights of understanding...(there are tons of references to other more detailed texts)...in the end, you will have had but just a glimpse of Einstein's oeuvre. Thank you.

Pais's book is the best scientific biography of Einstein to date. The author, as an eminent particle physicist turned historian, has the ability to understand and portray Einstein's work as few others could. Foelsing's biography is better for depicting Einstein's "life and times", and the scientific milieu in which Einstein came to maturity.

I thought that this was an enjoyable book, written with frankness and verve. I felt (as far as you can) that the real Tony Curtis was speaking: for example, there were no concessions to modern "political correctness", nor was the language toned down.

Curtis tells of his childhood in New York, (the grinding poverty and racism, the tragic events his family faced), then of his break into Hollywood, his film career, his struggles with drug abuse and alcoholism, his marriages and his development as an artist.

There's lots of interesting pictures scattered throughout the book, and Curtis's narrative is interspersed with contributions from Barry Parris (mostly discussing Curtis's films), as well as from family members, work colleagues and friends.

In all, it's a lively book, though some readers might feel that they wanted more on the events leading up to the breakdown of Curtis's marriages. But I suppose that everyone has a right to their own privacy, and this autobiography is frank and interesting enough as it stands. Far better than the average Hollywood autobiography.

G Rodgers

I have enjoyed reading this book. I find Tony's blunt honesty amusing. I will be reading along and suddenly laugh out loud over something he has said just because it is so plain-spokenly blunt. Of course I would hate for that bluntness to be used against me.

Curtis is kind towards his first wife Janet Leigh. Maybe that is because she has been kind towards him. It seems that he doesn't have much to do with his other ex-wives. At the time this book was published he was married to a girl named Lisa.

Curtis also was/is very sensitive about his being Jewish and how he was picked on as a kid, and as an adult (the stuffed, taped tail-pipe in Germany-read the book to find out what that is about).

Curtis was always a very good-looking man and he knew it, and he's honest about knowing it. His idol was Cary Grant. He wanted to make movies with Marilyn Monroe and Mae West so he could say he and Grant were the only actors to make movies with both. Curtis' tale about filming "Sextette" with Mae West is hilarious.

I love his honesty, but there is alot of anger in him. Too bad he couldn't get therapy to work that out. It probably contributed to the break-down of his marriages, and his drug habits in the past. You have to give him credit for surviving though.

I have to say that his performance in "Sex and the Single Girl" is one of my very favorites. He and Natalie Wood had such a strong on-screen chemistry.

This book is perfect if you want to read about TC, other famous people, the movies, or a young boy who went through a lot and grew up to be famous and go through some rough times again. TC tells us about his childhood, his teenage years, his brothers, his women, his kids, his films, he makes us laugh and he makes us cry. He is an amaizing guy. This autobiography, with the help of BP, is a brilliant read. It's not just for people who were around in the sixties either. I'm 16 and have read this book twice. I recomend this book to anyone that is a fan like me, or anyone who likes to read a good book.