To The Last Page

If there is one important life lesson you learn as you get older, it's to try to be more generous, understanding and less judgemental about other people as you come to recognise that you can't know what troubles and problems others are living through. That's not entirely the purpose of Arnold Thomas Fanning's memoir on suffering from mental illness, depression and living with a bipolar disorder to give you such pause for thought; to a greater or lesser degree, we all have our concerns, issues, insecurities and regrets, but it certainly helps put your own issues into perspective when you hear about the author's personal experience in Mind on Fire . Having picked up this book from Amazon, I'm aware now through further recommendations that there are many books about coping with mental illness and relating personal experiences of living with mental health problems. What is different in the case of Mind on Fire is that it is an account by someone who was a writer be...

As a fiction writer of some very dark crime novels (the 7th DS McAvoy novel Scorched Earth is one of the bleakest I have read), you wouldn't think that David Mark is the ideal person to write a self-help book with an optimistic outlook on dealing with mental illness. But that's ok because Piece of Mind is not a self-help book but it is nonetheless a book that will certainly help some people (many people if it gets out there) gain a better understanding what a person with mental health issues is going through; whether you are dealing with it yourself or whether you live with someone suffering from depression, bi-polar, borderline personality disorder BPD, OCD or ADHD. That's more people than you might imagine and you wouldn't always know, so Piece of Mind can help you recognise the signs. I mean, you wouldn't think a talented bestselling and seemingly self-confident author like David Mark would suffer from low self-esteem,. depression or indeed such debilitating m...

The recent boom in Netflix true crime documentary series has perhaps led to certain expectations for shock revelations and finger-pointing, even if in reality of such cases in The Staircase and Making of a Murderer can never answer the basic questions of the unexplained deaths at the heart of their true-life crime dramas. Anyone expecting a definitive answer in Mikita Brottman’s investigation into the mysterious unexplained death of one man in her home town of Baltimore is going to be disappointed then, but just as those Netflix series throw a fascinating light on the American legal system and processes and reveal underlying social issues and prejudices, so too Brottman’s An Unexplained Death likewise has other worthwhile avenues of interest to explore. Not everything can be explained, particularly when it comes to the motivations and state of mind of a man who leaves home unexpectedly one evening in 2006 and doesn’t come back. His body is found eight days later in the annexe to a tal...

A passionate, troubling and at times personally conflicted exposé of the Neapolitan mafia the Camorra, Roberto Saviano examines the origins, the history and the bloody rise to power of the various clans to become a powerful and influential force not just in Campania or Italy but throughout the world. In Gomorrah, in a manner that would force him to go into hiding following publication, he names names, examines the environment that gave rise to the Camorra, and tries to understand the thought processes behind their actions, behaviour and their business practices. What is revealed is staggering and on a scale almost beyond the ability of the reader to grasp. Saviano shows a more widespread and powerful organisation than the more well-known Sicilian mafia, a confederation of clans and cartels that has its fingers in almost every aspect of world commerce - not just gun-running and drug-dealing, but in everything from the fashion industry (passing off high quality copies with the tacit agre...