Selected Product:
| The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British
Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Author: Sarah Lyall
Publisher: Tantor Media
Release Date: September 2008
ISBN-10: 1400108357
ISBN-13: 9781400108350
List Price: $34.99
Average Customer Rating:
  | |
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
ISBN-10: 0385340990
ISBN-13: 9780385340991
List Price:$22.00
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
ISBN-10: 0307269752
ISBN-13: 9780307269751
List Price:$24.95
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
ISBN-10: 0307264785
ISBN-13: 9780307264787
List Price:$24.95
Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
ISBN-10: 1857885082
ISBN-13: 9781857885088
List Price:$17.95
The Official Filthy Rich Handbook
ISBN-10: 0761147039
ISBN-13: 9780761147039
List Price:$11.95
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall (ISBN-10: 1400108357, ISBN-13: 9781400108350).
At this time we have not yet written a review for The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall (ISBN-10: 1400108357, ISBN-13: 9781400108350). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Dispatches from the new Britain: a slyly funny and compulsively readable portrait of a nation finally refurbished for the twenty-first century.
Very enjoyable read!
| Customer Rating: | | I enjoyed this book through and thorough. Very informative, witty, insightful, and well-written. The chapter on CLASSES had me laughing outloud more than once. Highly recommended! |
Intelligent and Insightful
| Customer Rating: | Well researched as well as full of firsthand experiences.
Organized into chapters dealing with topics:
- attitudes towards sexuality
- members of the Houses of Parliament - way of setting laws
- newspapers
- alcoholic consumption
- cricket
- language differences between upper and lower classes
- House of Lords - changes to what it was and now is
- self-deprecation
- eccentricity and tolerance towards
- hedgehogs
- bad teeth
- expansion of products and consumerism since WWII
- stiff upper lip
- using weather as both an ice breaker and a barrier to intimacy
The above are general because the chapters touch on larger observations.
What is not covered is the effect of the influx of multiple former Empire cultures such as Indians and Jamaicans except to the extent it has expanded the British diet/restaurants.
Good ending chapter on further reading.
I read the Kindle version. Active table of contents and the hyperlinks between footnotes and back to the chapter are flawless.
|
Read it and weep (with laughter)!
| Customer Rating: | I picked up this book when my husband was in the ICU of our local hospital, and I hoped that it would provide a momentary diversion from a ghastly situation. In fact, from the first chapter I found myself muffling my guffaws so that the nurses didn't think I was some kind of loon. I even got impatient when my husband wanted to talk. He was distracting me from my glorious distraction!
In creating this wonderful testimony to British quirkiness Sarah Lyall has expanded upon the old adage that the U.K. and the U.S. are "two countries divided by a common language" to include the different ways in which the British view politics, culture and even sex. The chapter on how differently the British parliamentary system functions from our congressional one is both insightful and charming. The one on British men's hang-ups on sex is, well, eye-opening. And although I have a couple of minor complaints with this book (for example, the chapter on cricket is as tedious as the sport itself)I give Lyall high marks for not falling victim to the temptation to write yet another sappy book of Anglophilia.
Most of us who have lived in England as expatriates or had extensive stays there as tourists instantly recognize that we are in a foreign country. (All you have to do to reach this conclusion is read the letters to the editor of the Times of London.) But Ms. Lyall's experience, in that she has been a working journalist and the wife of a British writer, goes beyond what most of us experience. As such, it is a richer and deeper exposure to British culture and her approach, full of humor and a strong sense of irony, has produced a magical book. Cheers! |
As revealing about the author as the subject
| Customer Rating: | | To someone who does not know the British this will provide an entertaining, if somewhat alarming, introduction to the subject. Some of the observations are spot-on (cricket and sadly, alcohol - in even small towns every weekend is like Spring Break with drunken teens rendering centres 'no go' areas for those less inebriated). However, other observations seem to be colored more by the author's own prejudices - which are occasionally, but rarely acknowledged. For example, visitors to Britain may be surprised to find most of them have (nearly) all their own teeth. Lyall would have you believe otherwise. And for someone who has married a Brit, and has two British children, a tone of laughing with her subject - rather than at them, might have been less condescending. Finally, in a breathtaking display of ignorance of how the British make tea, the jacket cover shows a tea bag being put in a cup - after a week in London (let alone a decade) every American would know they use a tea pot. While this is not the author's fault, it does betray the problem with the book - the triumph of condescending point scoring over understanding or much empathy. |
Tea drinking, class obsessed, sexually repressed, socially reserved, determinedly eccentric, emotionally distant?
| Customer Rating: | Basically serves as a confirmation of British stereotypes (tea drinking, class obsessed, sexually repressed, socially reserved, determinedly eccentric, emotionally distant), with examples from Lyall's experience as an expatriated American married to an English man. As such, it was mildly amusing, nothing more.
In fact, Lyall grew up in New York City, according to her book-flap bio, which means I have to translate her observations through another filter, as her "American" experience does not reflect mine; I was born in a small Pennsylvania town and grew up on a 19th-century farm house at the end of a gravel lane. I never visited New York City until an adult, and have spent probably five days total there as a visitor; Nor have I ever been to England, even though I have been to Canada, and I do work remotely with some team members in England and Ireland (also China, which is neither here nor there, and in any case "working remotely" does not constitute even glancing knowledge of culture and peoples). Oh, and I also attended an employer-sponsored orientation which included folks from England, Ireland, and Scotland, whose conversation amongst themselves, especially in the happy hour after the daytime sessions, was completely incomprehensible to my ears, and where the man from England, attempting to explain to the listening Americans what a "budgie" was, finally resorted to exclaiming in exasperation "You, know a budgie, like Tweetybird!" then shook his head and muttered sadly "Civilization only extends so far."
I did find interesting the sense of "otherness" that Lyall felt amongst her adopted nation, even after many years and raising two daughters there. There is no mistaking the differences amplified, not dampened, by the common language.
Not a life-changer, but a pleasant way to pass a few hours, especially if you are on your way to or from a trip to England. |
|
