The SAS Bravo Two Zero hero and bestselling author goes into battle for the Express Christmas fundraising campaign on behalf of Give A Book
SAS HERO and best-selling author Andy McNab CBE, 62, is going into battle on behalf of the Daily Express Christmas fundraising campaign in partnership with the charity Give A Book.“Reading does change people’s lives; I know, because I’m one of those people,” says the author of the bestselling SAS memoir Bravo Two Zero.
McNab, whose latest thriller, Down To The Wire, was published earlier this month, continues: “I’m throwing my support behind the Daily Express Books Change Lives campaign because putting books in the hands of the people that need them the most is the difference between being the kid who keeps themselves at the back of the class, because they’re embarrassed they can’t learn, or getting the job that pays more because they can fill in their job application.
“But reading gives you much more than just knowledge and power. It provides empathy and imagination. Being able to travel anywhere in the universe and at any time in history to learn about other people and their situations helps you to understand what’s beyond your own world.
“It helps you realise that we are all much the same. It’s the difference between being able to read a bedtime story to your kids, or not.”
Yesterday the acclaimed historian and novelist Dame Antonia Fraser launched our campaign to help promote the power of reading in the hardest-to-reach places. Express Editor-in-Chief Gary Jones said: “Books and reading are crucial in so many ways so I’m delighted the Express has been able to throw its weight behind Give A Book for our 2022 Christmas charity appeal.
“It’s a remarkable, inspiring organisation that works minor miracles and I’m confident our generous readers will show their support.”
That support means the charity will be able to distribute even more books in schools, prisons, mother and baby units and among disadvantaged children.
McNab can relate directly to the impact that books can have on marginalised people. When he joined the Army in 1972 at the age of 16, it was found that he was “functionally illiterate” with a reading age of 11. Having been abandoned as a baby in a Harrods shopping bag and arrested for a string of burglaries while growing up with foster parents, he read his first book during basic training.
“I was in a classroom, alongside about 20 other boy soldiers, with an old sweat of a captain standing up front,” he recalls today. “He said, ‘You’re not thick, you’re just not educated. But, from today, all that changes’.”
McNab would go on to become the Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier by the time he left the SAS in 1993.
The first book he read in the Army was a Janet and John tale aimed at primary school children. Twenty years later he wrote the greatestselling war story of all time, with