Sports books for Christmas: MacArthur feat is one we can all dip into
Dame Ellen's account of race around the world provides an easy read of a difficult challenge
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Your support makes all the difference.Ellen MacArthur, Dame of the realm, has touched the lives of people far beyond her own world; people who would not dream of setting foot on a wild, barely controllable sailing yacht, who would not want to venture into wild, totally uncontrollable areas of desolate ocean. They admire a fount of true grit that would make John Wayne look slightly camp and a down-to-earth approach that would have made Joyce Grenfell - remember her? - sound a bit of a drama queen.
Now, just as it was inevitable that Tony Blair would bandwagon his way with her into Falmouth at the end of setting a round the world record by making her a Dame, so the book of the film of the television spectacular is on the shelves Race Against Time (Michael Joseph, £20).
It is a book with a difference in that, although it is a regular hardback on the outside, it is laid out as a 290-page magazine on the inside. There are dozens of pictures and picture spreads and this makes it the exact opposite of what is sometimes enthusiastically endorsed by the words, "I couldn't put it down. I just had to read it from beginning to end in one session." The format, which uses a daily diary, means that it is a book to dip into whenever you like. MacArthur has always been disarmingly honest and she invites you without reservation into her world and her life.
A quite different world, one into which you can unashamedly escape, is the gentle cruise through life which has been the journey of that much-loved cartoonist Mike Peyton Quality Time? (Fernhurst Books, £12.95) and two-thirds of it is a retrospective of his cartoons. definitely one to live in the loo for all the right reasons.
And for the dedicated nerd/anorak is a fascinating fund of did-you-knows contained in George Drower's Boats, Boffins and Bowlines (Sutton Publishing; £14.99) which, in a rich package of research, traces the invention of the catamaran to 1662 and the compass to a Chinese war machine in 2,600BC.
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