Book reviewer COLIN STEELE looks at the lives of two very different people.

Finding My Way by Malala Yousafzai is a very different book from her 2013 book, I Am Malala, which recounted the aftermath of her having been shot in the head by a Taliban assassin in 2012.

In 2013, Malala and her father co-founded the Malala Fund to bring awareness to the importance of girls’ education and the empowerment of young women. In 2014 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest ever recipient.

Finding My Way (Orion, $34.99) picks up the story of her life as she navigates, with many personal and political challenges, her teenage years and then three years at Oxford University studying PPE (philosophy, politics and economics).

Malala, still has to have final operations on her face in New York and is treated for PTSD, but, in many ways, greater challenges come from trying to grow up in the public sphere as a “mythical heroine, virtuous and dutiful”, always accompanied by bodyguards, while at the same time being trolled on social media for actions deemed un-Islamic.

She says: “I could stand behind a podium all day, calling out the worst abuses perpetrated by men, and it would never stir up the level of media attention that wearing jeans did.”

At Oxford, she makes up for a lack of social activity when living with her parents in Birmingham. She joins a plethora of clubs, stays out late dancing, escaping her security guards, and continues with international speaking commitments, which are the main source of income for her family in Birmingham and Pakistan, so much so that she falls behind with her studies until she is taken to task by her tutors.

Then after a platonic relationship with an alleged drug-running older student, she slowly falls in love with and eventually marries Asser, a young cricket executive from Lahore.

But initially, major family and cultural (#Shame on Malala) problems arise, including a strict mother who insists that Malala “must marry a Pashtun man… Your father and I will come up with a list of options and you can choose from those”.

Finding My Way is a deeply personal and surprisingly uplifting memoir of a person finding herself, while commenting on topics such as mental health and cultural differences (especially girls’ education), it concludes with the sentiment: when I think about “what is happening today to millions of Afghan women and girls, my body tears itself apart with grief”.

AND now for something completely different, although there are also elements of darkness in Robert Ross’s biography, Seriously Silly. The Life of Terry Jones (Coronet,$34.99). An aside, when I was writing this review Big W was selling Ross’ book for $12, a loss leader for them. Big W, with its stock of 100 bestsellers, puts immense pressures on independent bookshops.

Monty Python member Jones was a multi-talented actor, writer and director, although he could be a very naughty boy at times, in terms of his extramarital relationships.

Comedy historian Robert Ross, who knew Jones well in later life, delivers a conventional, chronological account of Jones life from his birth in 1942 in Colwyn Bay to his death in 2020.

The gaining of a scholarship in 1961 to Oxford University was the making of Jones. Here, he gained his love of medieval literature – his first published book was a scholarly reinterpretation of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale – and his meeting up with Michael Palin and the beginning of their long friendship and writing partnership.

Jones was co-director with Terry Gilliam of Monty Python and the Holy Grail film, but Ross glosses over some of the criticisms of his other productions, such as The Saga of Erik the Viking and Absolutely Anything.

On the personal front, Jones had met in 2003 a young Scandinavian, Anna Soderstrom, then studying at Oxford University. Jones eventually left his wife Alison to marry Anna in 2012.

Ross notes that Jones had always had what Michael Palin called ”dalliances” with women throughout his marriage. He was not the only Python in this regard. Eric Idle reflected in his memoir on the hedonism of the 1970s Monty Python fame.

Soon after the marriage, Jones was diagnosed with a rare form of dementia, an illness that was publicly evident, as Ross documents, in the massive Monty Python London O2 concerts in 2014. After his death in 2020 Jones’s brain was flash frozen for medical research

Ross is certainly a passionate advocate, sometimes overly so, for Jones, but overall he comprehensively captures Terry’s multifaceted creative achievements.