My uncle had such a harried schedule and such uncertain breaks that he too often couldn't indulge his love of reading at work. He carried these books to work because you could read a chapter in five minutes--then go on to the next chapter hours later with no loss of continuity.

He also loved the tv version, though he was getting a bit hard of hearing by the time I lived in his house, and often needed a translator at hand for the Yorkshire dialect.

If I were recommending, I'd recommend both. I don't have a very good visual imagination, and the landscapes in the tv show are very good illustrations. There's also a good coffee-table book called "James Herriot's Yorkshire". On the other hand, I don't remember bits like a farmer telling Herriot "Mister, your brakes aren't ower savage" in the tv version--but maybe I just missed that one.

Early in this genesis book, Herriot expresses astonishment by describing something as 'one for the diary'. Reading these detailed anecdotes composed years after the fact (the first edition came out in 1972, though the first date in the book is 1937), I have to conclude that either Herriot kept quite a copious diary, or that he had a phenomenal memory. Perhaps both.

These books are not only warm stories written by a careful and loving observer. They're also very good historical material. The ability to convey what it was like to live in the Yorkshire Dales and Fells in the period, and to make such points as that large domestic animals are not substantially less dangerous than large 'wild' animals is rare and rightfully valued. And as someone who came into the area while major changes were occuring, the Scottish urbanite Herriot is probably one of the best observers of what was very good, and what was terrible, of a life that had changed little since the 'pacifications' of the Normans--but was changing rapidly, even far back into the Pennines, in this pivotal period.