Book review: Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens

Author: Eddie Izzard.

Reviewed by Samantha Keogh.

Review made possible by Penguin Random House.

I can usually find something good to say about any book I read – even some of the most boring books they forced us to read at school like The Pearl or Of Mice and Men for instance, but this is one book I have struggled with.

There simply is no light at the end of this very dark, extremely long tunnel.

Let me start by saying I am not a fan of Eddie Izzard’s work, so I had very few expectations.

Thank heavens for that because it certainly does not deliver!

The man’s life quite frankly just isn’t interesting enough to warrant 368 pages, especially when a good deal of the book is dedicated to mundane details – I mean every little detail – of a particularly ordinary, and boring childhood.

Taking out all the dreary bits and the great wads of repetition would probably reduce the book to about 40 pages.

I have have trudged through those 368 pages and can honestly say those 40 pages are really all you need in order to get the gist of his life.

Let me sum up: His mom died, he went to boarding school, he experienced failure, he succeeded – the end!

That’s all you learn after hours of laborious reading and looking for a soupçon of interesting content.

Luckily, I’m a fairly fast reader, which meant only three hours of my life were wasted.

Unless you are a die hard fan, save your money.

Oh, and I almost forgot to add – I never found the ‘jazz chickens’ which made the book’s title rather alluring!