Elegy for liberalism?
| AN OUTSIDERS VIEW |
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| Ken Fuller |
A few more second-hand or remain-dered book bargains, three of which will be mentioned here, have recently come this outsider’s way. Each overlaid by a somewhat elgiac air, all three are, coincidentally, by British authors.
Cider with Rosie has an international reputation, being the 1959 memoir of author Laurie Lee’s childhood in a Gloucestershire countryside which, like its millennium-old lifestyle, was beginning to disappear as the horse gave way to the internal combustion engine. While it’s true that you can still find expanses of English countryside today, it is the slow life, its pace dictated by the seasons, that has gone.
Lee was born in 1914, and when the book closes he is in his teens, but patches of England’s rural past which he so poetically describes maintained an obstinate if precarious existence for several decades after this period. Indeed, the first five years of my own life, commencing in 1946, were not dissimilar to Lee’s. Like him, I was born into a fatherless family (although my own lacked the small army of siblings that distinguished his) in an impoverished rural setting..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101130com5.html
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