Something wholesale: my life and times in the rag trade

This is Eric Newby's best book, even better than his travel books. On the surface, it is a book about working in his family's wholesale clothing firm, but it is really an ode to his father. The preface, in which he conveys the reader through a presumed chronology of his dad's life by describing family photos, is a classic. The characterizations of the people who work at the firm, and the buyers who come to negotiate purchases, are hilarious. Though most of the book describes Newby's comings and goings in the conduct of the business, the frequently interlaced episodes of life with father, who ran the business, conveys the sense of respect Newby had for his dad. A great book.

SOMETHING WHOLESALE, by Eric Newby, was on my must-read list after reading the first two chapters of "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush." This was his account of trekking in Afghanistan in more peaceful times, and it opens with an account of the end of his career in the wholesale clothing trade. He inherited the trade from his parents, largely for lack of an alternative. Every paragraph reveals the absurdity of the business he was in; perhaps the problem was that his parents did not deal in clothes that were of particular interest to the British. (They made a dress and coat for his wife, who burst into tears when she tried them on; they were burned in their back yard.) Kevin L. Mahoney