A Stranger's Eye: A Foreign Correspondent's View of Britain - Hardcover

Keane, Fergal

4.07

15 ratings by Goodreads

9780670888399: A Stranger's Eye: A Foreign Correspondent's View of Britain

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670888397 ISBN 13: 9780670888399

Publisher: Viking, 2000

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How has Britain changed since the Second World War? Do the expectations and aspirations of 1945 match up with the realities of turn-of-the-century Britain. Fergal Keane travels the land to look for answers to these questions. Himself an outsider,born and raised in Ireland, Keane questions the state of today's nation and asks how it is we've got to where we are, and do we really want to be here.

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Review:

Fergal Keane's incisive television reporting, rightly ranking him as a distinguished foreign correspondent, hones his trademark short, sharp sentences that have penetrated the surface of events and circumstance around the world upon Britain in this, his latest venture, based upon a BBC series. He is a wonderful observer, offering not an overview but an underview of the state of the nation. Writing with a controlled passion, he treads the byways rather than highways, giving voice to marginalised men and women whose stoicism somehow sustains them as they stand stranded on the sidelines of the meritocracy march. Whether it is Glasgow shipyard workers fighting to save their jobs, farming communities in North Wales and Devon struggling to survive, or the dispossessed and degraded on a Leeds estate downtrodden by social depravation, Keane brings his integrity and warm humanity to the telling of unsung heroics and courage against the unfriendly forces of economics and environment. When his objectivity is allowed to slip by recalling his own childhood experiences around Dublin--he has chapters on Catholics and Protestants in a town in Ulster subverting entrenched sectarianism-it is not out of a personal sentimentality but a felt need to comprehend (for himself and therefore his readers) the pain and pride he encounters on his journey. Keane is no idealist, he carries no ideological baggage, but the incurable optimist in him believes that more should and could be done. --Michael Hatfield

From the Publisher:

Press review
"Valuable and frightening social documents... He is a careful listener, a brave interloper, a clear communicator." - Financial Times

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