Yes We Have No: Adventures in the Other England

I enjoyed this book, the whimsical characters Cohn meets are a fascinating subsection of the British underground types.

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.