Pre-order Sir Sean Connery's 'Being A Scot'
Following up earlier reports that Sir Sean Connery had planned to release his autobiography/memoirs in time for his birthday in August, fans can now pre-order Being A Scot from Amazon.co.uk (where the cover artwork can now be viewed).
Mixing a ‘frank account of Connery’s life with an esoteric take on Scotland’s history and culture,’ the 312-page long book will feature more than 400 photograghs from his personal collection.
Included are details on his childhood in a gaslit Fountainbridge tenement, learning golf from co-star Gert Frobe during the shooting of the third James Bond film, Goldfinger, and weekending with Billy Connolly, ‘the funniest man alive’.
Being A Scot will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and is due for release on 21 August 2008. A paperback edition by Phoenix will follow on 6 August of 2009.
The official blurb follows:
“My first big break came when I was five years old. It’s taken me more than seventy years to realise that. You see, at five I first learnt to read. It’s that simple and it’s that profound. I left school at thirteen. I didn’t have a formal education… It has been a long return journey from my two-room Fountainbridge home in the smoky industrial end of Edinburgh opposite the McCowans’ toffee factory. There was no bathroom with a communal toilet outside. For years we had only gas lighting. Sometimes the light in the shared stairway would be out after some desperado had broken the mantle to bubble gas through milk for kicks.” Although he is an indubitably international superstar, Sir Sean Connery still knows the city of Edinburgh practically street by street from delivering the morning milk as a schoolboy. His round included Fettes College, where Ian Fleming had sent his fictional James Bond after he was expelled from Eton. Being A Scot is a vivid and highly personal portrait of Scotland and its achievements, which is self-revelatory whilst full of Sir Sean’s desire to shine light upon Scottish success and heroic failure.His personal quest with his friend and co-writer Murray Grigor has been to seek answers to some perplexing questions.
How did Scots come to devise so many new sports and games, or raise others to new heights? What gave fire to the Gothic tendency in Scottish literature? Why have so many creatively inventive and influential architects been Scots? Where did Scotland’s unreal blend of psychotic humour originate? And what about the national tradition of self-deprecation sometimes called the Scottish cringe? Sean Connery offers a correction to misconceptions that many believe are part of the historical record whilst revealing as never before his own vibrant personal history.
- Order the UK hardback edition of Being A Scot from Amazon.co.uk
- Order the UK paperback edition of Being A Scot from Amazon.co.uk
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