|
| Tracey Turner |
| Hodder Children's Books |
| 0340917148 |
| Sep 2006 |
 |
|
A little knowledge can sometimes go a long way…! Have you ever wondered how many decibels the loudest burp on record registered? Are you eager to learn which animal urinates down its legs to keep cool? Could you stand to learn about the horrible habits of the frigate birds?
If you want to avoid the perils of luncheoning on head-cheese, ensure you’re not subject to the vomit-inducing Scottish cure for worms or circumvent a trip on a ‘violet cart’ “The Yuk Factor” is essential reading. Impress your friends with your wide, varied and frankly disgusting diction with key terms such as entomophagy, micturation and oncychophagia. With four hundred questions covering all you could ever hope to know – and a great deal you really would rather not – about the gruesome, the grim, the grotesque and the grisly, “The Yuk Factor” is guaranteed to inject bilious brilliance to any quiz. Though indigestible, this informative book will make an indelible mark upon mind and memory... Doubtless most would be diabolically delighted to find it lurking at the bottom of their Christmas stockings!
|
Non-Fiction: November 2006 Archives
|
| Robert Westall ed. Lindy McKinnel |
| Catnip Publishing |
| 1846470080 |
| Sep 2006 |
| |
“there is a freedom in ghostliness. You break the surface of life and let the underside come out. If even life is a flat plane, the ghastliness gives depth and height. It’s a new dimension.” Without question one of the foremost talents in contemporary children’s literature, the collection of memories and reflections that have been sensitively collated and assembled to form “The Making of Me” offer unique insight, awareness and allow greater understanding of the formative years of writer Robert Westall offering a rare glimpse at the root of many of the concerns and preoccupations rooted throughout his body of writing. A remarkable book, in equal parts because of its method of conception and its content, the musings and memories collected here make for a remarkable legacy. Upon Westall’s premature death in 1993, his literary agent Laura Cecil and partner Lindy McKinnel discovered several autobiographical pieces amongst his papers. Placed in chronological order alongside previously published autobiographical stories, the collection provides the closest equivalent to an autobiography for Robert Westall and offers a fascinating and rare insight into the author’s childhood and the ongoing influences this exerted over his writing. This a book to be relished by aficionados of one of the most extraordinarily diverse, prolific yet consistently assured children’s authors of the past century, it is a book to be valued by scholars and an invaluable resource that needs to be read by all with an interest in the field and development of children’s literature. An inspiring and life-affirming work, it has stimulated a new desire to re-read a number of Robert Westall’s novels again, an opportunity in itself aided by publisher Catnip who have simultaneously made a new edition of Westall's supernatural thriller, “The Wind’s Eye” available.
|
