What do you think?
Rate this book
SNAPSHOTS FROM MEMORY: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A GREENOCK ACADEMY SCHOOLBOY
Author, artist and retired Depute Head, Jo Johnson was born and brought up in the leafy suburbs of Greenock in the West of Scotland. Educated at Greenock Academy until the age of fourteen, he experienced a profound culture shock when the family relocated to Kilwinning in Ayrshire, where he found himself in a much rougher school environment.
Born into a devoutly Christian family, Jo had to balance the competing demands of ‘church and state’ at an early age. His story is peppered with entertaining, poignant and occasionally unpleasant memories, of growing up in 1960’s Greenock and his coming of age in 1970’s Ayrshire.
He documents his experiences as an art student at Glasgow School of Art and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. Later chapters trace his journey to find work with a waxworks company in London, teacher training in Liverpool and back to Scotland, where he taught art before moving into school management. Jo’s faith in God and his connection with the Churches of God, is a recurring theme throughout the book. Read on to find out how Jo responded to a significant and unexpected medical challenge.
Born into a devoutly Christian family, Jo had to balance the competing demands of ‘church and state’ at an early age. His story is peppered with entertaining, poignant and occasionally unpleasant memories, of growing up in 1960’s Greenock and his coming of age in 1970’s Ayrshire.
He documents his experiences as an art student at Glasgow School of Art and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. Later chapters trace his journey to find work with a waxworks company in London, teacher training in Liverpool and back to Scotland, where he taught art before moving into school management. Jo’s faith in God and his connection with the Churches of God, is a recurring theme throughout the book. Read on to find out how Jo responded to a significant and unexpected medical challenge.
422 pages, Paperback
Published December 9, 2021
1 person want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 8, 2022
I have a massive issue with this book because of its title. As a former pupil of Greenock Academy in the 60s, I was interested to read another person's experience of the school a decade later. Would he have the same teachers? Would they still have their little peccadilloes? How much had the school changed over the ten-year period, with a new headmaster in charge?
In fact, there are very few pages in the book devoted to the Academy and many, many more devoted to his evangelical approach to Christianity, naming in painful detail the countless people he met through the Church of God organisation to which he belonged, telling stories of church summer camps, copying out the words of hymns or letters he had received over the years from young campers, or even sharing with the reader poems that he had written himself (how the English teachers I knew at Greenock Academy would have groaned over them as they prepared their red pens for a (very) critical appraisal that would definitely not include the words "literary merit").
I see the title of this book as a form of "mental reservation", the willingness to use a half-truth as a means of drawing people in. Yes, the author was a Greenock Academy schoolboy, so in that respect the title is true. However, life at school comes very low down on his list of priorities as far as the content of this book is concerned so the suggestion that this is a book with multiple references to his experiences at the Academy is very misleading and doubtless designed to encourage people with no interest in evangelical Christianity to buy his otherwise uninteresting book.
Lastly, and this is a pet hate of mine, if he must include a couple of words of French in his text, he could at least have had them checked by a passing French teacher. My own favourite languages teacher at the Academy, Mr. Peter Crumlish, would be spinning in his grave if he saw the mangled mess reproduced here!
I gave this a good shot and read 70% of it but then I could take no more. This is one of the very few books on my DNF shelf and one of the few to receive only one star.
In fact, there are very few pages in the book devoted to the Academy and many, many more devoted to his evangelical approach to Christianity, naming in painful detail the countless people he met through the Church of God organisation to which he belonged, telling stories of church summer camps, copying out the words of hymns or letters he had received over the years from young campers, or even sharing with the reader poems that he had written himself (how the English teachers I knew at Greenock Academy would have groaned over them as they prepared their red pens for a (very) critical appraisal that would definitely not include the words "literary merit").
I see the title of this book as a form of "mental reservation", the willingness to use a half-truth as a means of drawing people in. Yes, the author was a Greenock Academy schoolboy, so in that respect the title is true. However, life at school comes very low down on his list of priorities as far as the content of this book is concerned so the suggestion that this is a book with multiple references to his experiences at the Academy is very misleading and doubtless designed to encourage people with no interest in evangelical Christianity to buy his otherwise uninteresting book.
Lastly, and this is a pet hate of mine, if he must include a couple of words of French in his text, he could at least have had them checked by a passing French teacher. My own favourite languages teacher at the Academy, Mr. Peter Crumlish, would be spinning in his grave if he saw the mangled mess reproduced here!
I gave this a good shot and read 70% of it but then I could take no more. This is one of the very few books on my DNF shelf and one of the few to receive only one star.
April 22, 2023
As the author I am biased in favour of my own writing! There's always room for improvement, but I've done my best to make this as honest an account of my life experiences and to write it in as engaging a way as possible without unnecessary verbiage. I shall leave it to others to give the final judgement.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews