Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Gripping	Customer Rating:
This is a great book, so much more information than the series on sky1. opens your eyes to things you'd never normally see...now reading gangs2.

Fantastic!	Customer Rating:
If you have watched the series on Sky1 then you will know what this book is about!! Its fantastic...Ross travels around the world meeting dangerous gangsters and gives a unique insight into their lives. Would highly reccomend! Can't wait for the next book!!

Not Quite What It Sets Out To Be

Customer Rating:

Well, I suppose the big beardy Anglophile yank had to do it sooner or later. As Bryson himself says in his introduction, the world doesn't really need another book on Shakespeare. From the incredibly specific and obscure to the uselessly vague and general, from the trivially lightweight to the inaccessibly somber, the Bard of Stratford is the subject of literally dozens of new books of facts, biography, analysis, opinion, theory and conjecture, every damn year. For all that, this was a worthwhile book to have written, which is more or less all we'd expect of Bryson, who is a clear, clever and witty writer who rarely fails to please. Bryson has chosen biography as his goal. The book is written in more or less chronological order, with chapters covering distinct periods in Will's life. Bryson starts by characterising the period, analysing the (usually scant) evidence available, then raising and scrutinising the various popular interpretations about what is known. He detours occasionally into anecdotal discussion about his researches or funny or impressive stories about other people's attempts at research, which all over helps it from getting too dry and to remain a very Bryson book. Throughout he's diligent about the distinction between evidence and interpretation. The problem is, we actually have pretty slender information about Shakespeare's life: a veritable wealth of data by the standards of Elizabethans in general, but still very little from which to derive any reliable idea of the facts of his life. Inevitably, this means foraying into conjecture from time to time; a practice at which Shakespearean academe excels, but a dangerous one. Bryson gives an example of the famous deer-poaching incident, a romantic guess made in the eighteenth century that was repeated as solid fact in Shakespeare scholarship for more than a hundred years after. Bryson, by contrast, while happy to include reasonable and useful guesses as to how to interpret what is known, is very careful to let you know what's fact - and where it's from - and what's conjecture and how it was arrived at. If you're seriously into your Shakespeare scholarship, this book probably doesn't have anything new to tell you (although Bryson's research is up to date, and he has access to facts I didn't have at Uni), but if you're only likely to buy one Shakespeare biography in your life, this isn't a bad one to choose.

Terrifying

Customer Rating:

This is a must read book. Very easy to read; very difficult to put down. A terrifying account of a disaffected youth (around the world) with no families, no morals, no futures and no hope. The author deals with the issues with sensitivity and fairness. You begin to understand why young people (some of them of obviously high intelligence) have become affiliated to gangs. Read this book and ask, "what the hell has gone wrong with civilised society?". A superb,thought provoking book.