Rating: 4/5
Review:
Interesting and readable
I enjoyed Airhead. It’s more of a collection of vignettes that a
full memoir, which means that I tended to dip in and out of it, but a
few sections at a time make very good reading. Each section
describes a memorable interview or event which Emily Maitlis reported
on, with background detail and some personal reflections.
This isn’t really
an autobiography or even a memoir. We get personal details of
Maitlis’s life and career only as they impinge on the story she’s
covering at the time – like the Grenfell Tower disaster, because
she lives close by and spent the day working as a volunteer there –
and I could have done with a little more background. Nonetheless,
she is quite self-critical and examines her motives and actions in
some depth at times; she gives a very good flavour of some of the
ethical dilemmas faced by reporters and doesn’t always conclude
that she did the right thing. I found this aspect of the book very
interesting and rather admirable.
The book is well
structured and prose is very readable, although (perhaps inevitably)
there is sometimes a little too much journalistic punchiness for my
taste. You know the sort of thing: talking of Hungary, “The eyes
of the world are once more upon it. But not in the way of old.”
That trick of a full stop and new, verbless sentence, rather than a
comma can get a bit wearing after a while. She doesn’t overdo it
too badly, but it did grate on me a bit.
Maitlis emerges from
the book as thoughtful, intelligent and perceptive with a
surprisingly deep vein of self-doubt – which probably contributes
to those qualities. There are some amusing moments, too, which
always helps and I can recommend this as a readable, interesting and
insightful book.
(My thanks to
Penguin UK for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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