- Free Article: No
- Contents Category: Memoir
- Review Article: Yes
- Custom Highlight Text:
This book is the best thing that’s happened to me since J.D. Salinger covered his typewriter, or went to Mars or whatever it was that happened to him. It’s a book to put in your satchel and take everywhere, so that in times of stress, you can take it out, read a chapter and feel your heart lift. In fact, it’s really too good for me to write about, but I don’t suppose the editor would be amused by a silent tribute.
- Book 1 Title: The Gift of the Gab
- Book 1 Biblio: McPhee Gribble, $12.95, 110 p.
Possibly people who live in Sydney, Perth or the capital of Iceland may not love the book as much as Melburnians, but I think they will. Its themes are universal. It’s about the things that really matter: Barry Dickins’ Mum and Dad, the waste of Vietnam, being a schoolboy (‘… Helen Waxell, a girl I loved, who went away in grade three. I remember Harry Waxell, her father, come shyly to take her away. I slept on her arm in those chalk-white days and sang back her heart’), nervous breakdowns, dogs, grief, headmasters, love and Australian humour (‘the workers ... look back at Barry Humphries on television, seeing themselves beaten down twice, once for their defeats and once again for the successes of Michael Edgely, Paul Dainty and the Comedy Theatre’).
The snapshots are accompanied by Dickins’ delightfully scrambled illustrations and a few photographs which will being a lump of nostalgia to many a throat.
The book has one or two small printing errors but they don’t seem to matter much. It is dedicated to a lady named Rosie, who’s lucky to have the honour.
Thank you, McPhee and Gribble for The Gift of the Gab.
Comments powered by CComment