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Three decades after his first book was published in England, James Herriot’s charming tales of life as a country vet in Yorkshire continue to delight readers. His nine original books have inspired television shows, children’s books, and special collections. All told, his works have sold more than 60 million copies and been translated into 20 languages. As his son observes in this heartfelt, affectionate memoir, Herriot wrote with such warmth, humour, and sincerity that he was regarded as a friend by all who read him. Wight assures readers that his father was every bit the gentleman they thought him to be, a self-described run of the mill vet who remained completely modest, even during the height of his success. The author recalls one evening when he and his father were having drinks with two farming friends. Although Herriot had been to Buckingham Palace the day before, he never once mentioned his audience with the queen.

James Herriot was a pseudonym used by James Alfred Wight, who graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939 and soon began his practice in the farming town of Thirsk (better known to readers as Darrowby). He would remain there for some 50 years, immortalizing a bygone era of veterinary medicine that he described as harder, but more fun. First as a small but very proud assistant, and later as a colleague in his father’s practice, Wight met many of the characters evoked so beautifully in Herriot’s books. Wight describes these real-life personalities fondly, with a flair that recalls his father’s remarkable storytelling abilities. Readers will delight in Wight’s portrayal of the mercurial, charming, impossible Donald Sinclair, aka Siegfried Farnon, whose advice to him included such aphorisms as Paint a black picture! If you say a case is going to recover, you could be in trouble if it doesn’t. As research for this memoir, Wight reread all his father’s books, looking for writing tips. Instead, he found himself being drawn into the stories. I always end up in the same state the book on the floor and my head back, crying with laughter, he says. What better tribute could his father have asked for? Beth Duris works for the Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.

Portrait of a flawed and fascinating idol Most of all, Kate Burford says in Burt Lancaster: An American Life, Burt Lancaster wanted to be an intellectual. It’s a dubious ambition and in connection with Hollywood borders on the oxymoronic, but of any film star of his era, he may have had the best mental equipment for it.

His physical equipment, however and I am fully aware of all that might imply put him on the more lucrative and esteemed path to megastardom. He was impossibly handsome, had a build a Greek god would die for, and moved with fluid grace across the screen. Everything, in short, to buckle the knees of filmgoers and apparently, of some of his female costars.

Plus, he could act. This is the most dubious of the artistic gifts, and not absolutely necessary to celluloid success, but in combination with a build and brain, it made him an unstoppable force in Hollywood for more than 40 years.

The life stories of film celebrities, especially in the studio area, were so often such a web of half-truths, myths, gossip, and outright lies constructed to protect (or destroy) careers that a biographer could be considered lucky to extract a bare skeleton from its threads. Buford manages to give us a fully formed human being, though not quite a full sense of the man. This lack may not be entirely her fault, not so much because the facts were so slippery, as that Lancaster was so complex. Eternally loyal to those who had helped him, he was also, one screenwriter said, capable of a kind of gratuitous cruelty born of years of Hollywood power.

He was born Burton Stephen Lancaster November 2, 1913, in New York City’s East Harlem to a family of respectable poor. Though his publicity always said he had little schooling, in high school he received an education that prepared him academically better than most of today’s college graduates, and he later entered New York University. But then he ran away to join the circus.

Lancaster spent most of the 1930s traveling with circuses as a trapeze performer, always playing smaller than small time. His first wife, June Ernst, was a fellow circus performer. She didn’t last as long as his acrobatic partner, Nick Cravat, who ended up on Lancaster’s Hollywood payroll for decades.

After World War II, during which he performed overseas for troops, came two of those amazing lucky breaks that make you think some people are simply darlings of the gods. Though hardly an actor then, in the fall of 1945 he got a role in a New York play that lasted barely two weeks. That was long enough for him to be seen by Harold Hecht, who became his agent and got his foot in the door of Hollywood.

The second related lucky break was that his first movie, The Killers (1946) was an incredible success. It was an extraordinary debut for a complete unknown, Buford writes. Overnight he was a star with a meteoric rise. He remained a star until his death in 1994, despite the fact that he dropped off the popularity barometer forever in 1964. And despite the fact that, other than Airport in 1970, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957 was his last truly popular movie. He’s still a star, really. The Chiclets teeth, the sneer, the grin, and the laugh, as Buford encapsulates him, are nearly as recognizable now as they were when the star was at its zenith.

Infrequently the author dips her pen in the purple ink. The body armor nature gave him like a surprise bonus would encase the wary child within makes you want to wince for that poor wary child. But she covers all of the ground Lancaster’s public and private lives, his aggressive success as an independent producer (with Hecht and later, James Hill); his wholesale womanizing; his liberal battle against the House Un-American Activities Committee; the often troubled existence with his alcoholic second wife, Norma Anderson, who bore his five children.

She is especially good at capturing the movie shoots, such as Sweet Smell of Success, which Lancaster struggled to bring out as an independent production in 1957. A critical and commercial disaster when it came out, it is now widely admired. Despite his many human flaws, so is Lancaster.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

The Langhorne sisters of Virginia were notable for many reasons, not the least of which was their hell-bent determination to use their polished social skills to flee the South and the down-on-its-luck heritage that had subjected them to near poverty in the early years of their lives.

All were born between the late 1860s and the early 1880s to Chillie and Nancy Langhorne, well-off parents who lost everything in the aftermath of the Civil War. With time, Chillie rebounded and made a fortune as a railroad entrepreneur, but his success had little effect on his daughters’ desire for expatriation.

Perhaps the most successful of the sisters was Nancy, who married a Boston millionaire, bore him a son, then divorced him in 1903 and moved abroad, where she married the richest man in England, Waldorf Astor, later second Viscount Astor. Lady Astor, as she was known, made history and news by becoming the first female Member of Parliament. Then there was Irene, the most beautiful of the sisters, who married Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl, which in the 1890s and early 1900s was the stand-bearer for fashion. Lizzie, the oldest sister, was the only one who married a Southerner, electing to stay in her native Virginia, a decision she probably regretted after the death of her husband in 1914 when she became increasingly dependent on her well-married sisters for financial assistance.

Nora, the youngest sister, accepted many marriage proposals, but finally married Paul Phipps, a British architect. Unfortunately, Nora possessed what today would be called a sexual addiction of prodigious proportions, and her marriage eventually crumbled in the face of a series of very public affairs. Eventually, she married a silent movie actor named Lefty Flynn.

Phyllis, the fifth sister, married well, divorced, then married Bob Brand, a British economist and intellectual considered one of the architects of modern European society. Author James Fox is the grandson of Bob and Phyllis Brand, and he undertook this history of the Langhornes after finding a trunk of letters that had been carefully preserved by his grandfather after Phyllis’s untimely death. These unpublished letters are both the strength and the weakness of the book.

They are important because they include correspondence with notables such as George Bernard Shaw and because they chronicle, in great detail, the sisters’ exuberant and sometimes wicked adventures. They are a weakness because Fox quotes too readily from them, thus slowing down the pace of the book. The most energetic parts of the book are those about Nancy’s son from her first marriage, Bobbie. As Nancy was preparing for a well-publicized trip to Moscow with George Bernard Shaw, Bobbie was arrested for homosexual offenses and sent to prison. Five Sisters is a fascinating book, but probably not for the reasons envisioned by the author. Fox sees this book as a romantic tale of sisters who seek to better their lives by leaving the South in pursuit of marriages to men outside their culture. You get the feeling that he considers escaping the South to be every Southerner’s secret dream.

Native Southerners will probably read this book with a different perspective. Most likely, they will see the Langhorne sisters as traitors to their Southern birthright, women who exchanged their affections for money and high social prominence in British society. They will see tragedy instead of nobility.

Either way this book is read, it offers insight into the pre-modern female mystique and documentation that the sexual revolution and the struggle for women’s rights began long before the social upheavals of the 1920s and the 1960s. In that sense, the Langhorne sisters were ahead of their time.

James L. Dickerson is the author of Dixie’s Dirty Secret and Women on Top.