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Telling Tales (Radio Collection) by: Alan Bennett List Price: £12.99 City Travel Guides Price: £8.99 You Save: £4.00 (31%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Audio CD Dewey Decimal Number: 920 EAN: 9780563478089 Format: Audiobook ISBN: 056347808X Label: BBC Audiobooks Ltd Manufacturer: BBC Audiobooks Ltd Publication Date: November 06, 2000 Publisher: BBC Audiobooks Ltd Release Date: November 06, 2000 Studio: BBC Audiobooks Ltd Sales Rank: 31198 Related Items:
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Editorial Review: Yorkshire Evening Post, 11 August, 2007: 'This delightful collection is full of the humour, warmth and poignancy that characterises his work... As with all of Bennett's work, Telling Tales is one of life's pleasures.' Book Description: The childhood memoir of one of Britain’s best-loved writers Synopsis: This book features ten childhood snapshots from the master of the monologue such as: "A Strip Of Blue", "Proper Names", "Our War", "Eating Out", "An Ideal Home", "Aunt Eveline", "A Shy Butcher", "Unsaid Prayers", "Days Out", and, "No Mean City". Following on from the phenomenal success of "Writing Home", Alan Bennett reminisces about his early years - from his schooldays to undergraduate life at Oxford University. It was an ordinary childhood - growing up in Leeds taught Alan early on that 'life is generally something that happens elsewhere'. Yet the children who long for German bombs to lend their city some wartime glamour; the working class mother who reads "Ideal Home" and dreams of coffee mornings and cocktail parties; and 18-year-old Alan - a practising Anglican who is deeply distrustful of God, strike a chord within all of us. In fact, it is their very ordinariness that makes these tales so special - combined, of course, with the wry observation and tender understatement that have earned Alan Bennett his place at the forefront of contemporary writing. About the Author: Alan Bennett is one of Britain’s best-loved and most highly acclaimed writers. He has written widely for radio, television and theatre. His latest play, The History Boys, won several awards, including Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Play and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. It also won six Tony Awards, including Best Play, following an extremely successful transfer to Broadway. In 2006 Bennett was named Author of the Year at the British Book Awards for Untold Stories, his recent collection of memoirs and diaries. Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - A saving graceI bought Alan Bennett's books on tape for my mother. She used to listen to them in bed at night, lying in the dark as Bennett's gentle, querulous voice described the minutiae of his family life in all its banal detail, illuminated by his wonderful observation and humour. Any one of his sentences will raise a smile. A whole book's-worth leaves you glowing with a feeling that all of our lives are equally full of this richness. How could they not be, when Bennett has found so much in what appears to be such a constrained and circumscribed world? He is indeed a national institution and we are fortunate that his voice on tape is perfectly equal to the poignancy and intimacy of his writing. Rating:  - Alan Bennett - Telling TalesIn this most superbly written autobiography, Alan Bennett turns his well observed prose onto his own past and vividly recreates and relives his childhood and youth for us over 10 seperate chapters. These 10 chapters are like snapshots - all are immensely readable and are full of Bennett's wry observations of working class life, the pecularities and foibles of his own family and his ever present awareness of the effect change has on a family holding itself together day-by-day with the spectre of World War II ever present in the book. Bennett succeeds in bringing his wartime world to life as we enter a world of family picnics out on the moors and singing on a Sunday around the piano (with his enduring Aunt Eveline) Food - and ... Read More: Rating: - A Total DelightThe mixture as before, warmth, charm, humour and a wonderful eye (and ear) for detail. Most people of the World War II generation will have similar memories, and for the younger listener these short tales bring to life, as does little else, what life was like more than half a century ago. The subject matter may be 'ordinary', but there is nothing ordinary in the way Bennett recounts it. He is one of the great joys of English literature and his inimical reading of his own texts is a source of constant delight. Rating: - From cover to cover - pure plessureThis was a present and one which I shall treassue. The tales of family habbits, obersavitons of the human character and life in 1940s Leeds is pure plessure. Mam, Dad,Grandma and Aunt Eveline will live with you forever. No matter if you grew up in the war years or like me were not born till much latter you can't help wanting a part of Bennetts Leeds. The feelings of a young boy and the accute observations of the writer looking back shine through. The observations of family and hometown are so accurate you think outloud yes that happen to me. Long live Alan Bennett. Rating: - Nostalgia for the Yorkshire of 60 years agoYorkshire people live their lives in ever-decreasing circles, according to a recent report in the Yorkshire Evening Post. A majority of them, we are told, live within 12 miles of their mothers. For a Yorkshireman about to leave this womb-like comfort zone and move to the dreaming spires of Oxford, it seemed a good idea to feed my nostalgia in advance by reading Bennett's Tales. Bennett, the "lad from Armley", has been the archetypal professional Yorkshireman on TV, radio and in print for many years now, but this latest collection is a supreme distillation of his memories of a particular time and place. My own memories are about ten years behind Bennett's, but he has the gift of making that world so real, so vivid - even in its very ordinariness ... Read More: |
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