James Herriot: The lfe of A Country Vet

This book by Graham Lord rates 5 stars, all negative, or five road apples--horse turds for the uninitiated. I began this book with anticipation and was sorely disappointed; the book is still-born from the beginning. This was obviously not an authorized biography and the writer would seem to have been no friend of his subject. Although reference is made often to the journals Alf Wight kept from his earliest days it rapidly becomes apparent that the writer had no access to these diaries and other papers. Lacking this access the author consults the public record and Alf's contemporaries pestering them it would seem with repeated interviews. All this would be fine if the research had been synthesized into a readable biography of the subject. Unfortunately what we get is a history reporting the writer's research which comes off as turgid, stodgy, boring reading. The writer begins by poking fun at the inaccuracies promulgated in previous attempts and then proceeds to commit his own. You will note that I've studiously avoided using the word authour in describing this book. If this be an example of the quality of the man's writing style one is left to wander why any publisher wasted the paper on his 18 other books. After plowing through

over a hundred pages of this book I decided that life was too short to waste on such mush.