CHILDREN · FICTION
Gervase Phinn
Gervase Phinn has been a teacher for 14 years, freelance lecturer, author, poet, school inspector for 10 years, educational consultant acting as General Adviser for Language Development in Rotherham UK, visiting professor of education and family man. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Honorary Fellow of StJohn's College, York, and lives in Doncaster with his family.
There was once a boy who, like many three-year-olds, was always asking questions.
— from Who am I?, 1992
Most acclaimed
All our yesterdays
Discusses the characters, popularity, and individual episodes of the well-known television series.
All These Lonely People
In Gervase's words: 'I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and like many at the time loved the music of the Beatles. They changed the whole face of popular music. I knew all the words of Help! A Hard Day's Night, Yesterday, Sergeant Pepper, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. My favourite was Eleanor Rigby. I don't know why this was my favourite because it's really sad and all about these lonely people, unlike many of the Beatles' songs. I remember wondering what this woman Eleanor Rigby looked like and what sort of life she led. I tried to imagine the lonely old priest, Father Mckenzie darning his socks in the night time alone. Well, perhaps they led lives like the characters in my story...'This charming tale shows the ups and downs of everyday life in a truly heart-warming way. It will have you laughing out loud and shedding a tear - both at the same time.
Who am I?
1992
"Who Am I? is the bittersweet memoir of a Chinese American who came to this country as a twenty-year-old graduate student and stayed to become one of America's most innovative intellectuals, whose work has explored the aesthetic and moral dimensions of human relations with landscape, nature, and environment."--BOOK JACKET. "Yet, Tuan finds his life increasingly marked by detachment and isolation. In Who Am I?, he probes what he sees as his moral failings, his lack of courage - including the courage to be open about his homosexuality - resulting, as he writes, "in a life that is seamed in ambivalence - achingly empty at the core, despairingly alone, yet often content, occasionally even happy," as when he catches glimpses of heaven in his exploration of the beautiful and the good."--BOOK JACKET.