Two Years Before the Mast

The Right Stuff - Test Pilots Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis - Medical Profession McTeague - Frank Norris - Dentistry Two Years Behind the Mast - Dana - Sailor in thr Merchant Marine The Red and the Black - Stendahl - Catholic Clergy The Centurions - Jean Larteguy - Infantry/Special Ops I always suggest reading fiction, it is a good source for lot of incidental knowledge about various aspects of life. Can anyone recommend books/novels on the English legal profession? Thanks.

Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana is about a way of life long gone, but it is well worth reading. As for the more recent merchant marine, Christopher Buckley's Steaming to Bamboola is very funny, and I suppose fairly accurate. For forest rangers, Norman Maclean's novella "USFS 1919", collected in A River Runs Through It, gives a picture of how it was then. August Fruge, longtime director of the University of California Press, wrote an excellent memoir, A Skeptic Among Scholars. There are many academic novels and memoirs, but I think very well of Alvin Kernan's In Plato's Cave. Also there is Herbert Simon's Models of My Life, which touches on academia and computing.