Anecdotes – DaneCobain.com

Title: Stormin’ Normans

Author: Terry Deary

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 144

Rating: 3/5

Roald Dahl – Stormin’ Normans

This wasn’t my favourite of the Horrible Histories books, but it was still okay. I just felt as though this one didn’t tie together as well as some of the others. I feel like there needs to be a sense of an overall narrative being told, even in a non-fiction book, and that was missing from here.

The good news is that there was plenty of information on the Normans themselves and some pretty entertaining anecdotes, as well as some information on the truth behind the legend of St. George and the dragon. But I won’t spoil it for you here, because if you’re interested then you should read the book. It’s not amazing, but it’ll pass an hour or so, even for an adult.

Terry Deary

Click here to buy Stormin’ Normans.

Brian Epstein – A Cellarful of Noise | Review

Title: A Cellarful of Noise

Author: Brian Epstein

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 218

Rating: 3.5*/5

Brian Epstein – A Cellarful of Noise

I got really excited about this because this is the autobiography of Brian Epstein, the manager of The Beatles. He wrote this when The Beatles were just about getting into the height of their fame, three years before he died, and it’s an interesting insight into his mind and into how he got to where he got to.

Unfortunately, it’s fairly insubstantial, less like an autobiography and more like a series of blog posts, although Epstein died back in the sixties and so I guess that makes him ahead of his time. But this doesn’t really go into the kind of detail that I was hoping for, and it reads more like a collection of anecdotes than anything else. It still has a certain amount of historical significance, of course, but equally it wasn’t anywhere near as good as I was expecting.

If you’re a big Beatles fan then go ahead and grab yourself a copy of this if you can find one for a reasonable price. From what I’ve seen, copies of this book are pretty hard to find, which is a shame, I guess. People have just forgotten about it, but I haven’t.