Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country
By Joe Queenan
3.5/5
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About this ebook
In this hilarious romp through England, one of America's preeminent humorists seeks the answer to an eternal question: What makes the Brits tick?
One semitropical Fourth of July, Joe Queenan's English wife suggested that the family might like a chicken vindaloo in lieu of the customary barbecue. It was this pitiless act of gastronomic cultural oppression, coupled with dread of the fearsome Christmas pudding that awaited him for dessert, that inspired the author to make a solitary pilgrimage to Great Britain. Freed from the obligation to visit an unending procession of Aunty Margarets and Cousin Robins, as he had done for the first twenty-six years of their marriage, Queenan decided that he would not come back from Albion until he had finally penetrated the limey heart of darkness.
His trip was not in vain. Crisscrossing Old Blighty like Cromwell hunting Papists, Queenan finally came to terms with the choochiness, squiffiness, ponciness, and sticky wicketness that lie at the heart of the British character. Here he is trying to find out whose idea it was to impale King Edward II on a red-hot poker-and what this says about English sexual politics. Here he is in an Edinburgh pub foolishly trying to defend Paul McCartney's "Ebony and Ivory." And here he is, trapped in a concert hall with a Coventry-based all-Brit Eagles tribute band named Talon who resent that they are nowhere near as famous as their evil nemeses, the Illegal Eagles. At the end of his epic adventure, the author returns chastened, none the wiser, but encouraged that his wife is actually as sane as she is, in light of her fellow countrymen.
Joe Queenan
The bestselling author of America and Queenan Country, Joe Queenan is a contributing writer at Men's Health and writes regularly for the New York Times, Forbes and Smart Money. His movie criticism appears every month in the Guardian Weekend section; he has appeared on Nightly Review, Newsnight and Front Row; he has written and starred in three short satirical programs on Channel 4; and can regularly be heard on BBC Radio 4. Mr Queenan lives in Tarrytown, New York.
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Reviews for Queenan Country
39 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Queenan can be a quite humorous chap, especially when he's riled up and his acid pen gets going. Unfortunately, in the case of "Queenan Country", he never gets particularly riled up, merely extolling the virtues of England, and in particular the fact that he can get around easy, see lots of attractions and still be in a pub by lunchtime. Which, to be fair, is a perfectly sound reason to love a country.So while this was a pleasant enough read, I'm still hoping he gets riled up about something again soon.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Joe Queenan is a very funny guy and I especially like his writings on movies. This British travelogue left me cold, possibly because I'm not that interested in England. After the lead-off story of a Liverpool cabdriver who claimed intimate knowledge of the Beatles, I lost interest and gave up after 56 pages.