Newham Bookshop events and news

Tuesday 21 September at 6.30 pm at Stratford Circus, Theatre Square, Stratford E15 1BX

Daniel Pennac

in conversation with Michael Rosen,

with translation by Sarah Ardizzone

Daniel Pennac has never forgotten what it was like to be a very unsatisfactory student, nor the day one of his teachers saved his life by assigning him the task of writing a novel. This was the moment Pennac realized that no-one has to be a failure for ever. In School Blues, Pennac explores the many facets of schooling: how fear makes children reject education; how children can be captivated by inventive thinking; how consumerism has altered attitudes to learning. Haunted by memories of his own turbulent time in the classroom, Pennac enacts dialogues with his teachers, his parents and his own students, and serves up much more than a bald analysis of how young people are consistently failed by a faltering system. School Blues is not only universally applicable, but it is unquestionably a work of literature in its own right, driven by subtlety, sensitivity and a passion for pedagogy, while embracing the realities of contemporary culture.

• School Blues is published by MacLehose Press in hardback at £16.99.

This event is organised in partnership with NewVic, Newham Sixth Form College.

Tickets £3 from Stratford Circus, telephone 0844 357 2625 or visit www.stratford-circus.co.uk

Friday 24 September at 7 pm at Wanstead Library, Spratt Hall Road, Wanstead E11 2RQ

Matthew Kelly

in conversation with

Eva Hoffman

Finding Poland

From Tavistock to Hruzdowa and Back Again

Following the partitioning of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, Matthew Kelly’s great grandmother and her two daughters were deported to the East. Thus began an extraordinary ordeal that took them, and many thousands like them, on a journey stretching from Siberia to Pakistan, and beyond. Their male relatives endured a parallel journey: arrested, exiled, and held as prisoners of war. Many were summarily executed by the Red Army. They saw the steppe, they were put to work in labour camps, they built sections of the trans-Siberian railway, they cleared forests, they toiled on collective farms. They knew hunger, exhaustion, disease and death.

Poland became the ally of the Soviet Union following the German invasion in 1941. For a brief time, families were reunited in Kazakhstan, before being evacuated to India, Britain, Mexico and East Africa. The experiences of these Poles had far-reaching consequences, for Poland, for Polish identity, and for the families that survived.

These incredible stories remain largely untold. In Finding Poland, Matthew Kelly makes a journey in his ancestors’ footsteps, travelling through places where they lived, to provide an account of these extraordinary people and their unique history. Part memoir, history and travel book, it is also considers the experience of displacement and exile, of the impact of such seismic disruption, and the deep legacies such trauma bequeaths.

Matthew Kelly was born in Plymouth in 1975. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a DPhil in Irish history in 2003. His first book, The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882-1916, was published in 2006. He writes for the London Review of Books and is now a lecturer in history at the University of Southampton.

Eva Hoffman was born in Krakow, Poland just after the Second World War to Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust by hiding in Ukraine. The family emigrated to Canada and then to the United States when she was a teenager. She received a doctorate in English and American literature at Harvard, and worked as senior editor and literary critic at The New York Times. She has written four non-fiction books, Lost in Translation, Exit Into History, Shtetl and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust, and two novels, The Secret and Illuminations. She has studied psychoanalysis, and has written and lectured internationally on exile, memory, Polish-Jewish relations, politics and culture. She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, MIT and Columbia. She now lives in London, “the perfect midway point between Manhattan and Krakow – not only geographically but along so many cultural dimensions”.

• Finding Poland is published by Jonathan Cape in hardback at £20.

Tickets £5 from Newham Bookshop or Wanstead Library, telephone 020 8708 7400

Children’s event – two performances: Monday 27 September at 11 am and 2 pm at Stratford Circus

Get every question you ever had about Roald Dahl answered by the ultimate Roald Dahl expert, author Michael Rosen. This event includes a unique opportunity to see a specially commissioned film about his life. The film features interviews with some of the people who knew Dahl best such as his long time collaborator, illustrator Quentin Blake and his granddaughter Sophie Dahl, who was the inspiration for the little girl in the BFG. You’ll have the opportunity to ask lots of questions, take a sneak peek into the Roald Dahl archive and much, much more…

Michael Rosen has been described as “one of the most significant figures in contemporary children’s poetry” and one of the first poets “to draw closely on his own childhood experiences … and to ‘tell it as it was’in the ordinary language children actua lly use” – Morag Styles, Books for Keeps: The Children’s Book Magazine.

Tickets £3 from Stratford Circus, telephone 0844 357 2625 or visit www.stratford-circus.co.uk

Friday 1 October at 7 pm at Wanstead Library, Spratt Hall Road, Wanstead E11 2RQ

Peter Snow: To War with Wellington

From the Peninsula to Waterl oo

The story of the men who fought their way across Europe to topple Napoleon told by those who were there. What made Arthur Duke of Wellington the military genius who was never defeated in battle? In the vivid narrative style that is his trademark, Peter Snow recalls how Wellington evolved from a backward, sensitive schoolboy into the aloof but brilliant commander. He tracks the development of Wellington’s leadership and his relationship with the extraordinary band of men he led from Portugal in 1808 to their final destruction of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo seven years.

Having described his soldiers as the ‘scum of the earth’ Wellington transformed them into the finest fighting force of their time. Digging deep into the rich treasure house of diaries and journals that make this war the first in history to be so well recorded, Snow examines how Wellington won the devotion of generals such as the irascible Thomas Picton and the starry but reckless ‘Black Bob’ Crauford and soldiers like Rifleman Benjamin Harris and Irishman Ned Costello.

Through many first-hand accounts, Peter Snow brings to life the horrors and all of the humanity of life in and out of battle, as well as shows the way that Wellington mastered the battlefield to outsmart the French and change the future of Europe. To War with Wellington is the gripping account of a remarkable leader and his men.

Peter Snow was born in Dublin, the son of a British army officer*. He studied Classics, Ancient History and Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1962 he joined ITN as a scriptwriter and reporter and began newscasting the same year. He was appointed Diplomatic and Defence Correspondent in 1966, and for the next decade reported from all round the world. He also covered elections and other live political programmes for ITN until he left in 1979 to join the BBC. He was one of the first presenters of Newsnight when it began in January 1980, and went on to cover elections and other live political events for the BBC until 2005. He left Newsnight to present Tomorrow’s World in 1997. In 2002 he made a programme with his historian son, Dan, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Alamein, and they have since co-presented several further series. (*The phrase, “and the daughter of an Irish surgeon” was included in Peter Snow’s publicity website. On reflection, it does not make sense and we should have noticed this before. Apologies if you were confused by this).

• To War With Wellington is published by John Murray in hardback at £25.

Tickets £5 from Newham Bookshop or Wanstead Library, telephone 020 8708 7400

Thursday 7 October at 7.30 pm at Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2 (Entrance in Brushfield Street)

Clive Bloom: Violent London

2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts

Almost as soon as it was built, London suffered the first of many acts of violent protest, when Boudica and her followers set fire to the city in AD 60. Ever since, the capital’s streets have been a forum for popular insurrection. Yet this is the first time that London’s ‘secret’ history has been fully explored – the underground wold of radicals and subversives from Wat Tyler to the Anti-Globalisation Movement via the Gordon Riots, the Cato Street Conspiritors, the Suffragettes, Moselyites and the IRA.

This is the story of an alternative London, as well as an alternative political history of the British Isles, outside parliamentary processes, sometimes poular, sometimes conspiratorial, in direct confrontation with the forces of the state, its police, military and secret service. It’s a story of political activism expressed in street fighting and slum warfare, in assassination and bombing, peopled by a fascinating array of demagogues and democrats, lunatics and libertarians, bigots and social revolutionaries. It is also the story of the growth of London as a capital and as a major city.

Covering nearly 2,000 years of political protest, with strong characters and a dramatic narrative, Violent London is a riveting account of the past and present conflict, revealing a hidden thread in our living history.

“An exhilarating rush through countless riots, insurrections and full-blown street wars…written in a racy and accessible style…As I read this superb history, I looked out at my quiet suburban garden, disappointed not to hear the sound of trumpets.” – J. G. Ballard, Daily Telegraph.

“A breathless but exhilarating journey from Boudica to such recent events as the aftermath of September 11th and the march of the Countryside Alliance, Bloom’s viewpoint is nicley balanced, critical of government and especially of the police, but not unreasonably so, and not too passionately keen that the rebels should win every time.” – Times Literary Supplement

“Seamless, full of information, connections and insights.” – Juliet Gardiner, BBC History Magazine.

Clive Bloom is Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies at Middlesex University. He is the author of Literature, Politics and Intellectual Crisis in Britain Today (2000) and Cult Fiction (1996), amongst many other titles.

• Violent London is published by Palgrave Macmillan in paperback at £16.99.

Tickets £6, concessions £4, from Bishopsgate Institute, telephone 020 7392 9220 or visit WeGotTickets.com