celticman's blog

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/radical/on-demand/76952-001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(film) Matomoris, Mexico 2011. (Based on a true story). Daniel Haddad as Chucho , headteacher of Jose Urbina Lopez Primary School. ‘Primary education is compulsory and free, but over 50% fail to make secondary education. We’re failing and test scores place us at the very bottom. Nobody cares what happens here. Just don’t go around kicking...

Amityville an Origin Story. BBC iPlayer, Directed by Jack Riccobono. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001vdxj/amityville-an-origin-story https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vdxn/amityville-an-origin-story-series-1-2-the-crime https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vdxq/amityville-an-origin-story-series-1-3-the-big-time https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vdxs/amityville-an-origin-story-series-1-4-the-feedback-loop I watch...

Callum McSorley (2023) Squeaky Clean. Not many people read the Acknowledgements. They’re on page 383, at the end of a book, I read in one go. It’s one of those books I read and think I could write—and have written versions of it. Working class people having a shite life. I read a review on Peter Turns the Page and knew this would have been the kind of book I like because it’s about people like me. The author’s job is to make their shite life...

I read every day. Less than 1% of what I read is poetry. And Ann Michaels Held isn’t a poetry book. But it’s got that feel about it. I checked the number of pages. 220. Because I also write, I’d estimate that’s between 60 000 to 80 000 words. I’d like to be more precise. It’s been a couple of days since I finished it (meaning to review it) and had to look at the Contents page. Now we’re getting somewhere. The first six chapters are labelled...

Drew Gummerson would be high on the list of books that need to be banned and burned in the good old US of A by the followers of the moron’s moron cult and stealer of elections he, apparently, never stole. Short stories that become longer stories. Fey wee folk that become fucking big folk that catch up with their shopping with their dead sister who gets stroppy about what you’re buying. (It happens.) A young boy, Ginny, with a massive wanger that...

Polly Tonybee is an author who writes regularly for The Guardian and Observer . You’ve probably guessed by that she’s left-leaning and middle class. An Uneasy Inheritance shows that doing good is not the same as being good. Her family includes the leading intellectuals of their day, including Arnold Tonybee, the economic historian and social reformer who charted the miserable conditions of how the working class lived in the late nineteen century...

This is the third John Boyne novel I’ve read and reviewed. For a short time The Heart’s Invisible Furies had a lot of hits on my blog site (Wordpress, and by a lot I mean over two in a week). I wasn’t sure why that was. I rarely remember what I wrote. Writing is a way of keeping track of time. His novel, classified for younger readers, and told from a child’s perspective The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which was made into a film, was, em, boring...

Reading is what I do. A book called The Book ? That’s an intriguing idea. It had me thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story, The Bottled Imp . Like The Book, the Bottled Imp had an illustrious history of previous owners. It granted great power and wealth. The Book allowed psychiatrist insight and access to what would happen in the ward in which Dr Alice Grant worked. A simple green cover. The Book had turned up in the little hospital...

Sabine Dardenne was twelve, cycling to school on her bike, when an old camper van pulled up. The side doors slid open. The kidnappers lifted her from her bike and stole her from her family, 28 th May 1996. Fifteen books were published in Belgium about her abduction. 400 000 pieces of paper into an enquiry of what happened and why it was allowed to happen. Eight years later, Sabine Dardenne with the help of author Marie-Therese Cuny, offers her...

Most nations have soldiers considered the best of the best. A deeply unpopular Margaret Thatcher won an election on the back of the Falklands war. On 5 th May 1980, it took the SAS 17 minutes, much of it filmed and shown repeatedly on the telly, of them abseiling from the roof of the Iranian Embassy in South Kensington to free 26 hostages. We love our heroes. Leah Garret is asking us to remember a largely forgotten group. It’s in the title: The...