James Herriot, a vet turned best-selling author, penned twenty books during his lifetime, selling over sixty million copies. His gentle, humorous, heartwarming narratives of the life of a veterinarian in England's Yorkshire Dales during the 1940s and 1950s touched a vein in readers of the late twentieth century. As Mitzi Brunsdale noted in her James Herriot, "an audience buffeted by brushfire wars, continent-spanning plagues, voice mail, E-mail, lost mail, MTV, and the Information Superhighway can still find solace in the disarming tales a gentle veterinarian from a Yorkshire town . . . and a . . . world far removed from the horrors of the nightly news, yet as intimate as the decency and compassion of the human heart." Brunsdale further noted that Herriot's work "charms his readers with a healthy nostalgia for what used to be best in our world as well as an unquenchable hope for what we want to think--in spite...