- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd (25 Mar 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0436203413
- ISBN-13: 978-0436203411
- Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.2 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,062,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Long-term commentator on the alternative and strange, Nik Cohn has an empathy with outcasts and exiles that makes his book of "adventures in other England" powerful and moving. In the company of the wired and the entranced, he goes to pubs in Toxteth and meetings of Odin-worshippers and just listens to people talking. This is not Cool Britannia and it is not a New Britain for New Labour--Cohn talks to communities of the marginalised whose sense of the way things works is entirely at odds with the squeaky clean. He talks to Asians who came here to work and find themselves hated by their white neighbours and unable quite to deal with sons and daughters whose version of a culture of their own draws on those bits of Asian culture they find austere or too wild and on a Britishness that has little to do with traditional ideas of work. He talks to embittered West Indians and only partially reformed Nazis--and to evicted squatters and dispossessed miners. Much of this book appeared as columns in the Guardian, but they are more permanent than that might imply; an angry portrait of a Republic of the excluded. --Roz Kaveney
Product Description
Cohn takes a long wild ride through England, a country he calls "the Republic", meeting the rising stars of the new culture, and also the casualties. Their collected stories, both weird and wonderful, combine to form a tapestry quite unlike any notion of England that has existed before.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well worth reading,
By A Customer
This review is from: Yes We Have No: Adventures in Other England (Paperback)
I'm not sure why I like this book, but I do. Cohn is a gifted writer - evidenced by the fact that he had earnt enough from being an author by the age of twenty-three to retreat to the Hertfordshire countryside - and the subject-mater of the book is simple: him and us and we together. At times, one almost feels that Cohn is out-of-his-depth - a middle-aged man trying to relive his mis-spent youth - but his infectious style, wit and keen eye mask any feeling of not belonging. Cohn is closer to the Republic he describes than you or I will ever be, but he is aloof enough to not be entirely convinced by it and its inhabitants. If the book seems indulgent and aimless at first, keep reading: once Cohn hits his stride (for me when he starts to describe Liverpool), you won't be able to put the book down.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Weird england explored,
By A Customer
This review is from: Yes We Have No: Adventures in Other England (Paperback)
This is a brilliant book about England and it shows that the image of us as all watching cricket and drinking warm beer is so outdated and wrong. I highly recommend it.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
2.8 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews) 12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dickens for the 21st Century,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Yes We Have No: Adventures in the Other England (Paperback)
And what would you know about anything, living in Connecticut. Boring Spain and Portugal... boring portraits of boring people, I went to Connecticut once, but that's another story and I don't want to shock you with tales of wild excitement...not! Nick Cohn is a great observer and storyteller; he finds uniqueness and originality in the mundane. Like Orwell and Dickens he has captured the zeitgeist in his expressive prose, traveling the length and breadth of the UK describing what he sees and whom he meets. When you live somewhere you tend to see it in a certain way, through a gossamer haze, you don't see the sharp edges any more, your brain forces you to filter certain things out, but when you move away from the place of your youth and then return, as Mr. Cohn did, everything that was once normal and comforting is now strange and different. Because of this Mr. Cohn gives us a refreshing view of life in the UK as it is for a great number of people as we head towards the next millennium, the fallout of Thatcher, of 15% unemployment and of the whole E generation. I'm sorry if you thought it was a worm's eye view of the British Isles, but wasn't Hard Times or the Road to Wigan Pier? Americans expect the UK to be all Pall Mall, Buckingham Palace and a weekend in the Shires. A modern day classic, if you are at all interested in modern day British sociology, give this book a try. I couldn't put it down.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Little New or Startling Here,
By A. Ross - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Yes We Have No: Adventures in the Other England (Paperback)
Gotta say that my high hopes for this book sank further and further with every chapter I read. Rather than present the "Adventures in the Other England" that the subtitle promises, Cohn instead gives the reader transcriptions of conversation after conversation. Yes, he does have a knack for finding interesting people to talk to, but once he's done that, he seems content to record what they say and leave it at that. One thing he does try to stress is what a melting pot England has become since WWII and what a diverse array of lifestyles it now hosts. But unless you're completely unaware and still think Britain is nothing more than a country of cozy tea rooms and ye olde tradition, none of this is news. A far more enlightening (and depressing) book on the state of modern Britain is Nick Danziger's travelogue "Danziger's Britain."
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fun but unreliable view of England,
By Belfast garden - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Yes We Have No: Adventures in the Other England (Paperback)
I'm not sure how successful Cohn is at describing the 'real' England. The motley cast of characters he 'happens' upon are just as unrepresentative of England as Dick Van Dyke's chimney sweep. But I guess a series of interviews with the real population of England - like anywhere else in the west: a collection of fairly nice but dull suburbanites - would not have made for a gripping read. And this is a gripping read - one of those books I couldn't put down. But I am suspicious of the provenance of much of the text. I get the feeling that much of what people say in the book seem to be things Cohn would have liked them to say rather than the actual verbatium 'truth'. Fair enough I supose. (By way of example, I come from Derry and I know for a fact no one but an imaginative journalist like Cohn could describe it in romantic terms!!) |
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
