[.ca] All Creatures Great and Small (ISBN 0330250493)

All things well written:
If you ever wanted to be a vet... "All Creatures Great and Small" will either inspire, or send you running off to be a lawyer. Heartwarming, funny, sad and highly educational, James Herriot's debut biography (he wrote five in all) give readers the whole messy, glorious picture of being a 1940s country veterinarian. The book opens (after a brief chapter taking place several months later) with James arriving in Yorkshire, to be the assistant to the eccentric but kindly Siegfried Farnon (yes, that is his name). He becomes accustomed to Siegfried, Siegfried's mischievous younger brother Tristan (yes, that is his name), and the gruff, kindly farmers who eke out a living in the Yorkshire Dales. Among the oddballs James encounters: Pampered pooches, savage pigs who chase Tristan around the farm, a nightmarishly strict secretary who drives Siegfried up the wall, James's brakeless car, cows running on three cylinders, a sadistic vet who makes James wear a rubber bodysuit, and an elderly, immensely wealthy widow who adopts a pig. And through this, James falls in love with the beautiful Helen Alderson and worms his way into the trust of the farmers. James Herriot (real name, James Wight) was truly a one-of-a-kind man. He let readers into his head throughout the book, where the cows kick him across the yard, farmers often treat him as an interloper or a nuisance, and his boss gives contradicting orders from one day to the next. But he never loses his drive or his love of animals. Okay, he hates some animals, but only as individuals. He even lets the readers see him at his worst, when he's humiliated by some recalcitrant livestock, and one horrible scene where he and his date show up drunk and mud-smeared in front of the girl he adores. (Not to mention when Tristan got him to use very feminine-smelling bath salts) But don't think that all of these stories are funny or romantic -- quite a few are aggravating or outright sad. James didn't soften the blows at all. There are a lot of details about surgery and animal care that will nauseate the squeamish, but at least you'll learn a lot of medical trivia. For example, what is a torsion? Herriot tells you early on, when he documents his nerve-wracking first case. But more than that, his love of animals is infectious -- it's easy to come out of this with a new appreciation for ordinary dogs, cows, cats, and so on. The people around James are just as fantastic: Siegfried, his weird but genial boss who can kick Tristan out of the house and forget about it overnight; Tristan, the mischievous anti-scholar who usually manages to keep out of trouble; and Helen, who seems a little too saintly at times (which isn't surprising, since James married her). It's sweet, sad, funny, romantic, dramatic, and full of the blood and sweat of vet work. "All Creatures Great And Small" is a truly unique and heartwarming biography.