11. The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British

By:  Sarah Lyall
Rated 4.5
Audio Book


Publisher's Description


Sarah Lyall, a reporter for the New York Times, moved to London in the mid-1990s and soon became known for her amusing and incisive dispatches on her adopted country. As she came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), she found that she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life. The roller-coaster decade of Tony Blair's New Labor government was an increasingly materialistic time when old-world symbols of aristocratic privilege and stiff-upper-lip sensibility collided with modern consumerism, overwrought emotion, and a new (but still unsuccessful) effort to make the trains run on time. Appearing a half-century after Nancy Mitford's classic Noblesse Oblige, Lyall's book is a brilliantly witty account of twenty-first-century Britain that will be recognized as a contemporary classic.

37. Vet in the Vestry

By:  Alexander Cameron
Rated 3.5 Stars
From:  Library

This was a pretty good book but just a little to reminiscent of James Herriot for me.  Also once he became a minister what interest I had in the story just kind of faded away.  Thankfully that was mostly toward the end.


Product Description

The colorful, charming story of a country-veterinarian-turned-country-minister--a healer of body and soul. Told with wry Scottish wit, these stories are filled with the kind of hearty embrace of human and animal ways that are reminiscent of James Herriot.

28. Breaking In - Breaking Out

By Nicholas Monsarrat
Rated 4.5 Stars
From:  Library

This 2 volume autobiography of Nicholas Monsarrat was published as one book titled Breaking In - Breaking Out in 1970.   I find Monsarrat's writing style very entertaining and his life, while kind of sad overall, still fascinating.  I always wonder what it is about someone's life that makes them turn into a very good writer.  Wistfulness on my part I imagine.

I've read most of what Monsarrat has written and consider this his best work. It is the story of his life, told in glimpses with 5-year intervals and gives the most vivid portrait of the pre-war era (social customs, education, family life and general way of thinking) that I have ever read.  

Monsarrat seems to hold nothing back and gives what effectively amounts to the story of his life, wonderfully condensed. Reading it feels like being inside his head, but he never goes too far. If you are at all interested in the pre-war era, Monsarrat as a person or how other people live and think you want to read this. I knew Monsarrat was a good writer, but the quality of this book still shocked me.


Summary

Nicholas Monsarrat was a noted English novelist, best known for THE CRUEL SEA. BREAKING IN, BREAKING OUT is an engaging and candid autobiography in which we follow Monsarrat to Cambridge, the Royal Navy, South Africa and Canada. We learn much about him, much more about the world through which he traveled. Monsarrat resists sentimentality while clearly expressing his hopes and frustrations as a writer and man.

42. Testament of Experience

By:  Vera Brittain
Rated 5 Stars
From Library

Testament of Experience picks up where Testament of Youth left off and covers the years 1925-1950.  While isn't as gut wrenching,  it's still an exceptional book by a very gifted writer.

From the back cover:

one of the most famous and best loved autobiographies of the First World War, Vera Brittain wrote both a heartbreaking record of those agonizing years and a loving memorial to a generation destroyed by war. In this sequel, she continues the story of those who survived. Once again Vera Brittain interlaces private experience with the wide sweep of public events. Personal happiness in marriage and the birth of children , pride in ther work as writer and campaigner are set against the fears, frustrations and achievements of the years 1925-1950. The depression, the growth of Nazism, the peace movements of the thirties, the Abdication, the Spanish Civil War, the horror and the heroism of the Second World War come alive again through the eyes of this remarkable woman, herself a testament to all that is best in the times she lived through.