What a useful book, being reviewed months after I finished it but only weeks into my move to London, where I have been putting some of the lessons I learnt to use! First off kudos to my friend Britt, who gifted me this book from her perch in Jolly Ol Oxford (our uni is older than your country TM) as a good guide for what I’m getting myself into.
This book is indeed quite fascinating, for all that it has some notable flaws that I am going to engage with first: Fox has a tendency to sort of hand wavingly, vaguely mockingly refer to ‘tribes in mud huts’ and the like as the ‘Exotic Other’ to illustrate something so opposite but equal to the quirky, worthy of studying civilization of the UK. And the thing is, I’m not so certain that she hits the mark of different but equal, a phrase that generations (well. two?) of U.S. school kids have learnt is inherently nonsense. Each time it came up I wanted to cringe a little, because if Fox would just stay in her lane I think the book would have been all the better for it.
Some of the nuances that she hits upon are genuinely quite insightful and I can see why, in her author’s note for the new edition, she notes that people have taken to calling it a “bible” and carrying it around as a reference book of sorts. There’s a lovely tendency to read her pithy chapter takeaways and feel like you’ve solved a segment of the population or a type of behavior you’re likely to run into. So English people are always funny but never sincere? Tattoo that on my wrist so I do not forget!
But as was drilled into me in a subsequent training I took on Inclusive Leadership (which turned out to be not really on that, important as it is, but on how to work with people from different cultures, which is also important), there’s no way to really generalize. And give Fox credit that she doesn’t, and honestly takes great pains to note that she isn’t trying to generalize as much as give some broad stroke observations that mostly apply most of the time. Maybe.
As you can tell from the number of highlights from this book on my Kindle, I found it very useful. What it is not, to my disappointment, was a Bill Bryson-like humorous take on English society. For what it’s worth, Fox isn’t a humorist, she’s an anthropologist turning her keen eye towards her own people. And with that lens, this is a very useful book.
