gridlore | In which I review a Book.

What Does This Button Do?: An Autobiography by Bruce Dickinson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A most unusual autobiography of a most unusual man. Bruce Dickinson is best known to the world as the lead singer of Iron Maiden. Maiden fans know that he is an avid fencer and airline pilot in his spare time. This book goes into some detail about those and other passions. What you will not get is any real details about his family life, marriages, or even Iron Maiden. Three-year-long world tours are dismissed in a few paragraphs while an entire chapter is spent discussing his work with a famous fencing master. The book is almost entirely missing autobiography standards like dates, places, extensive descriptions, and a narrative flow.

But it works. It reads like you are sitting with Bruce in a series of pubs where he's holding forth on a variety of topics. One day it's learning to fly a Cessna 187, the next his attempts to get a movie about Alastair Crowley made. It's chappy, but for the most part, it works.

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