Full name: James Herriot: The Life of a Country Vet

Author: Graham Lord Year: 1997 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Biographies, Non Fiction, Animals Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780786213870 9780786704606 0786213876 0786704608

Lord has researched and written a detailed and affectionate biography of a remarkable man whose charm and modesty remained unchanged by phenomenal success and adulation. Alf wrote amazingly little about his parents, his poor childhood in a crowded Glasgow tenement or his schooldays, but Lord describes them all in vivid detail after interviewing friends of Alf's from his earliest days in Glasgow up to the end in Yorkshire, where he worked for over fifty years with his partner Donald Sinclair, whom he called 'Siegfried' in his books, Lord has also uncovered some extraordinary events and hidden tragedies in Alf's life and he asks a series of pertinent questions. How much of the Herriot books was true? How much was fiction? And what was his real relationship with the various characters who inhabit the books. This warm but incisive portrait will be enjoyed by James Herriot's countless admirers but will also dispel the myths that have already grown up around the life of the most famous and deeply loved vet the world has ever known. Similar books: Cheever by Blake Bailey Nancy Reagan by Kitty Kelley Tove Jansson by Tuula Karjalainen Albert Camus by Herbert R. Lottman Truman Capote by George Plimpton Saint-Exupery by Stacy Schiff Howard Hughes by Donald L. Barlett Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster The Real James Herriot by Jim Wight May Sarton by Margot Peters In Search of J.D. Salinger by Ian Hamilton Anais by Noel Riley Fitch Flannery by Brad Gooch Invisible Writer by Greg Johnson Mary Renault by David Sweetman Thunder Dog by Michael Hingson Born Free by Joy Adamson Making Rounds with Oscar by David Dosa CLEO by Helen Brown The Underdogs by Melissa Fay Greene