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schopflin's review
5.0
This is funny, as you might expect but fascinating, intelligent and hugely insightful into both his life and how we as individuals negotiate growing up, our families and our various lives.
dansumption's review against another edition
4.0
Often, when reading an autiobiography, the childhood years seem a somewhat tiresome aperitif preceding the really interesting stuff. Here though, they are everything: Rosen's autobiography covers the time from his earliest memories, in the late 40s, up to his graduation from Oxford University during the student protests of 1968. It is a childhood recalled in surprising detail, and it provides many clues to how the young Michael Rosen cultivated the interests that led him to become a leading children's writer. His life was comfortable but not ordinary - the child of Jewish communists, something of an autodidact, with the confidence to take himself off to France alone for a summer in his teenage years. Just occasionally the prose is a little overwhelmed by tedious detail, but on the whole it's a fascinated read. And the prologue - a letter to the author's deceased father, telling him of the results of research into relatives "disappeared" during the Second World War - is unexpectedly moving.
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