Eccles Cakes An Odd Tale of Survival Jonathan Fryer 9781326719616 Books
Download As PDF : Eccles Cakes An Odd Tale of Survival Jonathan Fryer 9781326719616 Books
Terry Wise was one of the great early wargamers with over 40 books and 400 plus articles to his name. This classic book Introduction to Battle Gaming 'was cited by many people as their entry point into the hobby' Stuart Asquith. The book had chapters to help start wargaming and three straightforward sets of rules on Ancient Warfare, Horse and Musket and World War II. This edition includes the original book plus new material on Reflections on a lifetime of wargaming An appreciation by Stuart Asquith Three previously unpublished sets of rules by Terry Wise 18th Century Rules Napoleonic Wargaming Rules 1792-1815 Colonial Rules 1874 - 1914 The History of Wargaming Project is edited by John Curry. It aims to present the very best wargaming books and rules to a modern audience.
Eccles Cakes An Odd Tale of Survival Jonathan Fryer 9781326719616 Books
Like other books by Jonathan Fryer, histories and biographies, this book has elements of both but with a deeply heartbreaking personal story about the first nineteen years of Fryer’s life near Manchester, England. Adopted by Rosemary and Harold Fryer when he was in primary school, he always felt like an outsider in the family, and Rosemary responded to his questions about his biological mother by saying that she was no one special.At age seven, Harold begins molesting Jonathan, his hand under Jonathan’s bed clothes “like a spider that has plump pink fingers instead of legs.” Jonathan has no one to talk to about what his adoptive father is doing. He is too young to understand. He’s confused. He feels a “burning inside me” that he cannot explain. He only knows that his father does not relate to children, including his sister Hilary, like “a normal father.” During the annual visit by a representative of the adoption agency, he is sent out to play in the garden.
Jonathan is bored and uninspired at Manchester Grammar School (“my mind was elsewhere, yet nowhere”). Other than caring for his sister, he fails to connect to the people around him (he would like to have an older brother so Harold would not come into his room). He’s bullied by other school boys. Suddenly one day, he realizes that Harold’s “fiddling” with him has something to do with sex. He learns that what has happened is “dirty and wrong.”
From 1961 until 1969 (when the book ends), Jonathan shows remarkable resilience in his teen years. He develops an interest in writing and collecting books, ornithology, and organizing charity garden parties. He begins to find friends, focuses his studies on geography, takes trips to North Wales, and thinks about traveling someday. He also begins over-eating, experiences depression, and recurring nightmares about escape and entrapment engulf him.
Even though Harold stops coming to his bedroom around the age of twelve or thirteen, fear, anxiety, revulsion, and hatred of Harold plague him. He continually wonders about his mother, and thinks that any woman who smiles at him could be her. He turns around his academic career when his school allows him to focus on favorites subjects. He passes his ‘O’-levels in English Language, French, Geography, History, Math, and Latin. As a result, he gains entrance to Oxford, and escapes Eccles to travel throughout the Far and Middle East before entering the university. He develops an interest in “liberal-minded” politics, and has decided to become a writer.
Anyone who sees Jonathan’s travel writing as separate from his personal journey misunderstands how inextricably he has woven his travels into his personal search for his true self, a mysterious process of holding on and letting go (trying to find somewhere in the world without a trace of Harold, and waking in the night with reminders of him triggered by what he sees). At the end of his journey, he knows that “one day I will learn what I really want…. And I know I will find out who my Mother is.”
Fryer’s style reminds me of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” without the long run on sentences—part autobiography, part history, infused with personal insights into human suffering. We are reminded that while human suffering is universal, pure evil is not. It is a beautiful, transporting book.
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Tags : Eccles Cakes: An Odd Tale of Survival [Jonathan Fryer] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Terry Wise was one of the great early wargamers with over 40 books and 400 plus articles to his name. This classic book Introduction to Battle Gaming 'was cited by many people as their entry point into the hobby' Stuart Asquith. The book had chapters to help start wargaming and three straightforward sets of rules on Ancient Warfare,Jonathan Fryer,Eccles Cakes: An Odd Tale of Survival,lulu.com,1326719610,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY General
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Eccles Cakes An Odd Tale of Survival Jonathan Fryer 9781326719616 Books Reviews
In this memoir, Jonathan Fryer took me from his childhood to his early adulthood. Coming of age is hard, but the author succeeds in explaining how particularly difficult the search for his identity had become and the reasons beneath. Whether or not he realized this, he searched for happiness in each country he journeyed through, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Although I was born in a different era (and have yet travelled outside the US), I found myself in Jonathan over, and over, and over again. I really enjoyed this.
A delightfully open memoir of his childhood days. And it’s also highly detailed. You get to know what he had to eat/had to wear etc. as well as the more important and formative aspects of his early life – the distant step father and step mother and the rather strange relationships they had with each other. (Spoiler alert) You also get to hear about the weird sexual interference practiced on him by the step father and how it affected him.
Written light fluent prose, it’s easy to read and gives you a very good insight onto a troubled childhood, and the adjustments to society he had to make in his teenaged years – coping with others at school and abroad on his first travels. I only wanted the book to extend beyond his boyhood and see how he managed to cope with life and make such a literary success of it.
I was surprised at how unlike it is to his usual books – among which are masterful biographies of Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas and Cristopher Isherwood – all these are really worth reading if you want to understand the characters.
This memoir took me traveling -- unwillingly, at first, since I was more interested in knowing about Jonathan Fryer than the places he visited, but I quickly realized that traveling itself was essential to his development, not only the need to get away from an abusive step-father and 'ice queen' mother. What's more, I enjoyed 'traveling' with him laughing when he had to stand on the toilet in Paris to read a note posted high on a cistern that said, "It is forbidden to stand on the toilet seat," / The sexual abuse Jonathan suffered at the hands of Harold, his step-father, is written in an understated way that never diminishes its dreadful impact. I especially like the way he italicized the paragraphs that convey his boyhood dread, confusion, and the way unwanted memories, stirred by a scene, an scent, cropped up later when he was traveling. / Being a woman, I am awe-struck at the freedom an 18 and 19 year old boy had to travel "on a dime" so extensively (also envious), and by how relatively open the world was in those chillingly now-familiar places Phnom Penh, Mekong River, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan (Kabul, Kandahar), Iraq, Iran, Syria -- he saw them all, and much more. / I am also saddened at how we (humanity), appear to be in a downward spiral. I'm thinking of present Syria, of never-ending wars, of one tyrant after another (and I pray we haven't added one more to that infamous list). / I do wish I knew what Eccles Cakes taste like. Is there an American Version? And I do hope many people will read this well-written, thoroughly enjoyable memoir. Jonathan did more than survive his odd childhood, he prevailed.
M. Rogers
Like other books by Jonathan Fryer, histories and biographies, this book has elements of both but with a deeply heartbreaking personal story about the first nineteen years of Fryer’s life near Manchester, England. Adopted by Rosemary and Harold Fryer when he was in primary school, he always felt like an outsider in the family, and Rosemary responded to his questions about his biological mother by saying that she was no one special.
At age seven, Harold begins molesting Jonathan, his hand under Jonathan’s bed clothes “like a spider that has plump pink fingers instead of legs.” Jonathan has no one to talk to about what his adoptive father is doing. He is too young to understand. He’s confused. He feels a “burning inside me” that he cannot explain. He only knows that his father does not relate to children, including his sister Hilary, like “a normal father.” During the annual visit by a representative of the adoption agency, he is sent out to play in the garden.
Jonathan is bored and uninspired at Manchester Grammar School (“my mind was elsewhere, yet nowhere”). Other than caring for his sister, he fails to connect to the people around him (he would like to have an older brother so Harold would not come into his room). He’s bullied by other school boys. Suddenly one day, he realizes that Harold’s “fiddling” with him has something to do with sex. He learns that what has happened is “dirty and wrong.”
From 1961 until 1969 (when the book ends), Jonathan shows remarkable resilience in his teen years. He develops an interest in writing and collecting books, ornithology, and organizing charity garden parties. He begins to find friends, focuses his studies on geography, takes trips to North Wales, and thinks about traveling someday. He also begins over-eating, experiences depression, and recurring nightmares about escape and entrapment engulf him.
Even though Harold stops coming to his bedroom around the age of twelve or thirteen, fear, anxiety, revulsion, and hatred of Harold plague him. He continually wonders about his mother, and thinks that any woman who smiles at him could be her. He turns around his academic career when his school allows him to focus on favorites subjects. He passes his ‘O’-levels in English Language, French, Geography, History, Math, and Latin. As a result, he gains entrance to Oxford, and escapes Eccles to travel throughout the Far and Middle East before entering the university. He develops an interest in “liberal-minded” politics, and has decided to become a writer.
Anyone who sees Jonathan’s travel writing as separate from his personal journey misunderstands how inextricably he has woven his travels into his personal search for his true self, a mysterious process of holding on and letting go (trying to find somewhere in the world without a trace of Harold, and waking in the night with reminders of him triggered by what he sees). At the end of his journey, he knows that “one day I will learn what I really want…. And I know I will find out who my Mother is.”
Fryer’s style reminds me of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” without the long run on sentences—part autobiography, part history, infused with personal insights into human suffering. We are reminded that while human suffering is universal, pure evil is not. It is a beautiful, transporting book.
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