The Shepherd’s Life:  Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape
by James Rebanks
2015 / 304 pages
read by Bryan Dicks
rating:  9 / memoir

Why do we read memoirs?  Is it because the author is a famous personality  or had an interesting life like Oliver Sacks or Malala?   Maybe it’s because the author lived through extraordinary times like Rahimeh Andalibian and then there’s John Carey’s The Unexpected Professor – the life of a literary man – his thoughts on literature mixed with the way that life is lived.   –

The Shepherd’s Life is like none of those.  It’s the memoirs of a man who was raised on a sheep farm in the rainy Lake District in northwest England.  He left for awhile,  but went back pretty quickly and lives there now on his father’s farm which was his grandfather’s farm before that.  It’s a dying way of life.  I suppose this is an “extraordinary times”  type of memoir,  but it feels more like a report from a very ordinary person about what is to him a fairly ordinary life  in very ordinary  but changing times.    >>>>MORE (no spoilers)>>>>