Sarah Helm – “Ravensbruck”
About as harrowing as you’d expect, with an overwhelming roster of guards/prisoners to keep track of (though Helm reintroduces each character when she returns to them, which soon becomes essential). Always feels weird ‘recommending’ books like this, but it was an important project: the camp destroyed its records before the Russians rolled in, so Helm had to put a fair bit of work into tracking down survivors/victims’ families (and one ex-guard) and to sift through what documentary evidence remains, giving this hellhole an actual history beyond shoddy ‘70s pulp imaginings. The Red Cross don’t come out of this well at all…under pressure from the British govt and Polish underground to take action and monitor the camp, their response was a big fat ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, thanks to corruption, cowardice and plain apathy: perhaps the women prisoners should have tried infringing their fucking trademark.
George Tremlett: “Little Legs: Muscleman of Soho”
Here’s not what to do when you’re trying to squeeze distinctive social history out of an alcoholic dwarf: ply him with endless bottles of scotch in return for increasingly lurid stories. What could have been an interesting book about a Soho ‘freak’ performer who took part in ‘60s wrestling bouts and made an appearance in a Beatles film turns into overblown bullshit about running amok with the Kray Twins (guess the umpteen books on the Krays all neglected to mention the 4ft pimp crucial to their crime wave?) Tremlett’s decision to write it all in first person in a cockney accent takes it from tragedy to farce to ‘why am I still reading this shit?’ pretty fast. Little Legs had the last laugh: he drank himself to death shortly before this was published, scuppering Tremlett’s planned book tour. Honestly not worth it.
