Book review: My Family and Other Animus, James Jeffrey (2018)

This memoir disproves the old adage that every journalist has a book in them. The author is a News Corp employee and this book reads like a series of newspaper columns kept together with sticky tape.

It reminded me of the unreadable ‘The Bootle Boy’ by former News Corp editor Les Hinton that I reviewed here on 31 July this year, although it’s not quite as vile as that is. Jeffrey’s book is however amorphous, prolix and lacks any sort of narrative arc that might have helped it to coalesce into something solid and useful. It’s a stab-in-the-dark, a good try that wants at the same time to appear both wise and whimsical but, unfortunately, is a dreadful bore.