Searching for the Heart of Britain (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Americans and the British do not experience the same country.

An American will happily pay £32 to wander the staterooms of Buckingham Palace and call it the deal of a lifetime. A Briton will call it highway robbery and never go. We chase the Cotswolds, Yorkshire, and Edinburgh; they escape to Spain. We see a fairy-tale island; they see the price of a cup of tea and grumble. Somewhere in that gap lives the thing every Anglophile is really chasing - the heart of Britain.

For twenty-five years and twenty-two trips, Jonathan Thomas - founder of Anglotopia, the web's largest community for American Anglophiles - has been on a quest to close that gap. Not to see Britain as a tourist sees it, but to understand it the way the British understand their own country, while never pretending to be anything other than the besotted American he is.

*Searching for the Heart of Britain* is the record of that quest. Across thirty-six journeys, Thomas rides a Victorian steamer down Ullswater, spends New Year's in a frozen Dorset cottage, visits in Churchill's bedroom, hunts down the real Gold Hill that hung on his teenage bedroom wall, eats ham-and-cheese toasties at the literal edge of Britain, and rides a sold-out steam train to the Cornish seaside on the one perfect day of a very hard summer. Along the way, he asks why Britain is so frugal for a "rich" nation, why the first suburb was a Dorset village, and why a country that invented the railway simply refuses to let its steam engines go.

Part travel memoir, part love letter, part field guide to a culture Americans think they know, this is the third book in the trilogy that began with *Adventures in Anglotopia* and *An End to End*. It's for anyone who has ever fallen for Britain from three thousand miles away - and wondered what they were really falling for.

Come find the heart of Britain.