Reviews for Completely Cotswold: The Cotswold CD-ROM Interactive Guide Book

The average rating for Completely Cotswold: The Cotswold CD-ROM Interactive Guide Book based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-13 00:00:00 Wayne Brownell In middle age, Joe Bennett returned from his adopted country of New Zealand to take a tour around his native Britain, following roughly in the footsteps of H.V. Morton (In Search of England). Initially he intended to hitchhike, but when this was entirely unsuccessful he cobbled together a combination of buses, trains, walking, and a car borrowed from an old friend. His disappointed, critical, satirical approach is in the vein of Bill Bryson's recent The Road from Little Dribbling, and although I found the book mildly funny in places I mostly enjoyed it simply because Bennett stops in a lot of random places I happen to be familiar with: Newbury, Winchester, Salisbury, Dorchester, St. Austell. A few representative quotes: "For me, the taste of a warm, flat, thin pint of bitter is the thing that tells me I am home." "Meanwhile the English delight in bemoaning their climate, stressing its dampness. It suits the national trait of self-deprecation, and of muddling along somehow despite mild adversity. It's the attitude expressed in that defining phrase, 'mustn't grumble', striking a uniquely English note of making do, getting by, being grateful for small mercies, and knowing that there's others worse off." "In In Search of England Morton comes across as the debonair English gent, the patriot, the jovial patrician in a Bertie Wooster car. And for me that pose is beginning to ring hollow. … increasingly it seems to me that [Morton's] book is a form of propaganda. Morton was inventing England as much as he was discovering it." (And check out this metaphorical use of Donald Trump's name, way back in 2006! "The pastry was a bomb-casing, as thick as a finger, as rich as Trump.")

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-06 00:00:00 Darren Hubbard I get the distinct impression Bennett doesn't much like women. The book is peppered with vitriolic references to women's body shapes and I was astonished when I came across one mention of a "rather nice woman", my astonishment was that he'd said something positive about a woman. It's meant to be a fun read and for the most part it was but Bennett's no H.V. Morton and this book should be retitled "In search of a pub". I'm deliberately not giving it a star rating, it's a very blokey book full of pub conversations and deliberate references to things most English folk ( Antique Roadshow folk) don't talk about, yet somehow I doubt many men would bother to read it. There are two reasons I am glad I read it , it reminded me I have Betjeman's biography on my TBR pile and it prompted me to find Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning in my local op-shop.