What Movies Teach About Race - Exceptionalism Erasure and Entitlement

What Movies Teach About Race - Exceptionalism Erasure and Entitlement (Hardcover) - Roslyn M Satchel Product Description

No one is better poised to write the biography of James Herriot than the son who worked alongside him in the Yorkshire veterinary practice when Herriot became an internationally bestselling author. Now, in this warm and poignant biography, Jim Wight ventures beyond his father's life as a veterinarian to reveal the man behind the stories--the private individual who refused to allow fame and wealth to interfere with his practice or his family. With access to all of his father's papers, correspondence, manuscripts, and photographs--and intimate recollections of the farmers, locals, and friends who populate the James Herriot books--only Jim Wight could write this definitive biography of the man who was not only his father but his best friend.
The name Alf Wight may not ring too many bells, but as James Herriot--the author who brought the British countryside into millions of homes--Wight certainly made an impressive mark. He grew up in Glasgow and enjoyed a boisterous childhood before deciding to embark on many years of training at the Glasgow Veterinary College. Wight finally qualified as a vet in 1939 and moved to the Yorkshire town of Thirsk to accept a position as assistant to Dr. Donald Sinclair--the man known to millions of readers as Siegfried Farnan.

The story of the young vet travelling to Thirsk (a.k.a. Darrowby) was immortalized in Herriot's bestselling books. But The Real James Herriot, Jim Wight's affectionate biography of his father, tells the story of the man behind the nom de plume, who worked in the same practice for over 50 years and was relatively untouched and unimpressed by his fame as an author. Wight the younger (who followed in his father's footsteps and later joined the practice in Thirsk), is undoubtedly the best person to reveal the depths of a man whose public persona was as respected and trusted as the real man who tended to animals in and around the small Yorkshire village where he lived until the day he died. Written with a tenderness that does nothing to detract from the honesty of the book, The Real James Herriot is a fitting, poignant, and often gently humorous portrait of a man who brought so much pleasure through his writing while remaining consistently faithful to the profession that was, ultimately, his first and last love. --Susan Harrison, Amazon.co.uk