Nothing Quite Like It tells the story of an unusual childhood. The child of academic parents, the author was transplanted from Illinois to rural Wicklow in the 1950s. While his classicist father continued to spend part of the year teaching at the University of Chicago, he with his sister and philosopher mother Marjorie Grene settled down on the family farm in Ballinaclash.With this mixed background, he provides the sharp-eyed and affectionate perspective of an outsider on his experiences of childhood and adolescence; schooldays as just one of thirteen children in the local Protestant National School; the day-to-day work on a farm still worked with horses; the rigors of boarding school in Drogheda from the age of nine; the very different scene represented by living in Belfast; simultaneously starting college and farming on his own account. This vivid and wryly humorous memoir recalls a vanished world from a unique angle.