Another magnificent collection of animal rescue stories framed by Herriot’s enlistment in the RAF and his exit from same as a pilot. Inspiration for Alexander's hymn text "The purple-headed mountain, The river running by" has been attributed to four separate locations in Wales, Ireland and England. The veterinary surgeons also had a hard life, very often going out in all weathers at all hours of the night to treat sick animals.

Therefore, if All Things Wise and Wonderful is read by children (and older children above the age of ten or eleven do indeed often read James Herriot) this and a few other similarly problematic storylines might well need to be discussed, as there could be a few uncomfortable questions that arise. For a particularly whiplash-inducing experience, I listened to this book on audiobook during the same week that I read The Nightmare Stacks in hardcover, a weird scifi/fantasy invasion story that also just so happened to be set in the Yorkshire Dales.He showed me how to focus not just on the animals, but on the people who lived with the animals, and their loving, sometimes difficult and very wonderful connections with one another.

He remembers a night when there was an animal who had eaten too much fallen fruit and was in distress. 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. My other books in this series are much-thumbed editions, obviously read and reread until the color is rubbed off the spine-edges.Don't let my complainy-pants squawking deter you from diving headlong into All Things Wise and Wonderful.

Alternatively, inspiration may have come from William Paley's Natural Theology, published in 1802, that argues for God as the designer of the natural world. Dearmer questioned whether Alexander had remembered the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus ( Luke 16:19–31), and attributed her view of the world to her having "been brought up in the atmosphere of a land-agent on an Irish estate". The more adult tone of this book compared to the previous two is a bit jarring, but there's still plenty of the old goodness herein to make fans happy. Herriot was very interested in this man, wondering why he lived the way he did and even (it seemed to me) was a little envious of him.

This is such a heartwarming, hilarious and heartfelt collection of interconnected autobiographical short stories.