The "other England" of author Nick Cohn's title is the one not pictured in postcards or found in films like Notting Hill, an image of England outside the one the country projects to the rest of the world. It's an England that Cohn came to know by spending months as a tourist in his own land, where he found burned-out hippies, racist Odinists, immigrant strife, pounding electronica, and glimmers of hope. Though Yes We Have No is packaged like a tour book, Cohn's travels take him to places most tourists would never think to go, even if they knew they existed. Writing in a thoughtful, almost detached style, Cohn allows his subjects to do a great deal of talking. Those subjects include everyone from a female kickboxer with dreams of leaving her northern slum to a man who claims to be the Antichrist and doesn't understand why his letters of introduction don't convince more people. But Cohn doesn't content himself with the eccentrics—after all, that's almost as much an English cliché as tea and crumpets—but uses his characters as examples of larger populations, including the immigrant experience and the growing influence of ecstatic religious sects. It's a vivid portrait of present-day England as it prepares to enter the next century in the grips of a profound identity crisis—of race, class, and less tangible elements—that's changing it in many unpredictable and unusual ways.
Words
Yes We Have No: Adventures In The Other England
by Nick Cohn
(Knopf)
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