Synopsis
Here, at home inside a Jane Austen novel, I passed my college weekends, carving Sunday roasts and getting the station wagon serviced, explaining the double finesse in bridge, lacing up ice skates, sharing by radio the fall of Paris and the night bombings of London. . . having fallen not just in love but into a family.—from Let Me Finish
Roger Angell has developed a broad and devoted following through his writings in the New Yorker and as the leading baseball writer of our time. Turning to more personal matters, he has produced a fresh form of autobiography in this unsentimental look at his early days as a boy growing up in Prohibition-era New York with a remarkable father; a mother, Katharine White, who was a founding editor of the New Yorker; and a famous stepfather, the writer E. B. White. Intimate, funny, and moving portraits form the book's centerpiece as Angell remembers his unusual relatives, his attachment to baseball in the time of Ruth and Gehrig and the young Joe DiMaggio, and his vivid colleagues during his long career as a New Yorker writer and editor. Infused with pleasure and sadness, Angell's new book offers a fresh view of the insistence of memory. "Like it or not," he writes, "we geezers are not the curators of this unstable repository of trifling or tragic days but only the screenwriters and directors of the latest revival."
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
So: a lovely book and an honest one. What Angell writes may or may not be "true," but it contains truths: about loyalty and love, about work and play, about getting on with the cards that life deals you. It's also a genuinely grown-up book, a rare gem indeed in our pubescent age.