All Things Wise and Wonderful: The Classic Memoirs of a Yorkshire Country Vet

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Paley cited wings and eyes as examples of complexity of design, analogous to that of a watch, with God as the Divine Watchmaker. Going AWOL through a series of misadventures, one including marching along with another platoon, James risks everything to go back home for the birth of his child in an especially endearing and tear-jerking, edge-of-the-seat adventure that is a perfect example of why this open-hearted autobiographical series is so touching and beloved today. But then it would go off in a clumsy sort of way to his pre-war vet days and that was a bit distracting. James remembers Judy, Eric Abbot’s sheepdog, who used to watch James fix up the farm’s animals, almost like his own personal nurse.

Training as an RAF pilot in the smoke and bustle of wartime London is a far cry from James Herriot’s day job as a country vet in the Yorkshire Dales. Readers adored James Herriot's tales of his life as a Yorkshire animal doctor in All Creatures Great and Small and All Things Bright and Beautiful. Minor trivia note for those who are coordinating the books with the tv show: the story of Roddy the the tramping laborer is near the end of this book. Highly recommended especially in the audiobook versions read by the actor Nicholas Ralph who plays Herriot in the TV series. He wrote many books about Yorkshire country life, including some for children, but he is best known for his memoirs, which begin with If Only They Could Talk .We worked with cats and dogs, of course, but with farm animals, too, and apes and monkeys and angry pet raccoons, burros, crows, macaws– the variety of pets in Los Angeles was limitless. The hymn is commonly sung to the hymn tune All Things Bright And Beautiful, composed by William Henry Monk in 1887. They take the reader back to simpler times, when Yorkshire Dales' farmers had a hard life trying to make a living on small farms with cattle and sheep.

I raised the question with Better World Books and although they could not supply a hardcover version they were extremely generous in making up for the descepency.I think some of the stories were issued as stand-alone books--I'll try looking for them and adding them.

Later, they all meet up at the local pub, and of course, the soft-spoken man who tells of his bull being healed is sorely drowned out by the big mouthed man whose pig died. Frankly, I wanted more of the same: relatively low-tension drama about life as a country vet in 1930s northern England as dished out in the first two books of this series.

In 1969 Wight wrote If Only They Could Talk, the first of the now-famous series based on his life working as a vet and his training in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Don't let my complainy-pants squawking deter you from diving headlong into All Things Wise and Wonderful.

He especially remembers his first winter there, when one of his clients is dressed like he is ill-prepared for the weather, even though James is bundled up. James, torn from his very pregnant new wife and his beloved job as a large animal vet, has now said his (hopefully temporary) goodbyes and trudged off, drafted into the RAF. Percy Dearmer omitted this verse from The English Hymnal (1906); he was sympathetic to Christian socialism and stated that the words reflected the "passivity and inertia at the heart of the British Establishment in the face of huge inequalities in Edwardian society". In his real life Alf Wight suffered from depression and a recurring health issue that I think must have been horrendous to deal with.All James Herriot’s books, including two other omnibus editions, All Creatures Great and Small and All Things Bright and Beautiful, are available in Pan. All Things Wise and Wonderful contains hilarious and poignant stories of both the new people in Herriot’s life at the Barracks and his clientele back home. So while I was reading (or should I say rereading) All Things Wise and Wonderful (James Herriot's third veterinarian memoir omnibus, containing Vets Might Fly and Vet in a Spin), I realised that although it presents the author's wartime experiences training to become a pilot in the RAF (Royal Air Force), the frame narrrative of the author's RAF sessions and experiences, interspersed with and by remembrances of animals both great and small, of cases seen and treated both successfully and unsuccessfully, with both joyful and sometimes sadly tragic outcomes, really does not focus much on the actual horrors of WWII, on Nazi atrocities, on the bombing of England, but generally and primarily on the specific training sessions, on the author's personal experiences trying to learn how to become a pilot (and how, after his training is complete, an old medical issue arrises and proverbially clips James Herriot's wings).