Three Men in a Boat
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes seem fresh and witty even today. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator J.) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom J. often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog." The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity.Following the overwhelming success of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, titled Three Men on the Bummel (also known as Three Men on Wheels, 1900). A similar book had been published seven years before Jerome's work, entitled Three in Norway (by two of them) by J. A. Lees and W. J. Clutterbuck. It tells of three men on an expedition into the wild Jotunheimen in Norway.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jerome's classic British comedy is recounted by House's Hugh Laurie in a marvelously entertaining performance that will bring listeners to the banks of the Thames and carry them away into a world where three men and a dog named Montmorency venture from London to Oxford one sunny day. At just two and a half hours, the journey is short but sweet as Laurie captures the essence of Jerome's touching tale. With his classic witty tone, Laurie dives headfirst into each character, offering his own take on each colorful personality. There is a subtle theatrical aspect at work here as Laurie delivers a knockout one-man show that displays his wide-ranging talent.