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Let Me Finish

Name: Let Me Finish
Author: Roger Angell
ISBN: 9780156032186

by Roger Angell

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Overview

Widely known as an original and graceful writer, Roger Angell has developed a devoted following through his essays in the New Yorker. Now, in Let Me Finish, a deeply personal, fresh form of autobiography, he takes an 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 surprising relatives, his early attraction to baseball in the time of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and his vivid colleagues during a long career as a New Yorker writer and editor. Infused with pleasure and sadness, Angell’s disarming memoir also evokes an attachment to life’s better moments.

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.

About the Author, Roger Angell

ROGER ANGELL joined the New Yorker as a fiction editor in 1962. He is the author of seven celebrated baseball books, including Game Time: A Baseball Companion. He lives in New York and Maine.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

We would consider Roger Angell a national treasure for his superb baseball books alone. But the truth is, Angell is much more than a sportswriter. Sprung from impressive stock (his mother was the famous literary editor Katherine Sergeant Angell; his stepfather, the legendary E. B. White), this longtime New Yorker staffer has been delighting readers with his elegant, elegiac essays for more than 40 years. Falling midway between a bona fide memoir and a gathering of personal recollections, this wonderful book includes warmhearted reflections on Angell's childhood; his exceptional relatives, friends, and colleagues; and his long, satisfying career in the family business.

Jonathan Yardley

Publishers Weekly

Over the past few years, New Yorker readers have been treated to the occasional personal reflection from Angell, stepping outside his usual baseball beat to write about such intimacies as his passion for sailing or his childhood fascination with the movies. It's the family drama that's of most immediate interest, as Angell recalls the divorce of his parents, Ernest and Katherine Angell, and his mother's subsequent remarriage to E.B. White, affectionately known as Andy. Or perhaps readers will be more eager to hear about life at the New Yorker, especially since Angell admits, "I no longer expect to write" much more about his fellow writers and editors than the miniature portraits collected here (but thankfully we do have such scenes as the visit he and S.J. Perelman paid to W. Somerset Maugham while vacationing in France in 1949). Whatever the subject, Angell writes with his customary elegance and modesty; "I've kept quiet about my trifling army career all these years," he says in one essay, just before spinning off a series of captivating anecdotes about his WWII service. The assembled pieces add up to a fine memoir. (May 8) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Certainly not a biography and not strictly a memoir, this book by famed baseball writer and New Yorker fiction editor Angell (Game Time) is nonetheless a fully realized story that is frequently memorable and free of predictable prose, managing with wit and charm to enlarge the little things of everyday life (albeit in Angell's case, a privileged life). His recollection of his book-, movie-, and baseball-loving boyhood is warm but never fuzzy; likewise are his profiles of his Wall Street lawyer father, Ernest; his mother, Katharine, also an editor at The New Yorker; and Katharine's second husband, author E.B. White. A little of the heart, mind, and soul are revealed in Angell's disarming and telling snapshots of his Aunt Elsie, his mother's individualistic older sister, and of his father's free-spirited younger sister, Aunt Hildegard. Angell has hobnobbed with the famous, but they are mentioned as casually and naturally as if they were neighbors, relatives, or folks met on a holiday. Several of these chapters have already appeared in The New Yorker, but no matter; any reading of Angell's writing remains fresh, lively, and appealingly thoughtful. Recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/06.]-Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., IN Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A collection of personal pieces, combined into an affecting memoir by longtime New Yorker editor Angell. The author, a noted baseball writer (A Pitcher's Story, 2001, etc.), has many intimate connections to the magazine Gardner Botsford once dubbed "The Comic Weekly," in which most of these reminiscences originally appeared. His mother, Katherine, was the New Yorker's fiction editor; years later, Angell held her former job-and occupied her office. His stepfather, E.B. White, was the magazine's most important contributor during its most influential years. The memoir mostly concerns New Yorker colleagues and other remarkable people who have been a part of the author's life. His father, lawyer Ernest Angell, lost Katherine to the younger White but over the years became a figure of immense importance to Roger. Angell loved his mother, loved White, loved his first wife (not much here about the cause of their 1960s divorce), loved his coworkers, loved his job. His portraits are really tributes, whether of the well-known William Maxwell, V.S. Pritchett, Harold Ross or William Shawn, or the lesser-known Botsford and Emily Hahn. Angell offers some New Yorker-insider tidbits (Ian Frazier mimicked Shawn's voice so well that he could fool colleagues over the phone) and a bit more than you want to know about some of his aunts, one of whom wrote a book about Willa Cather. A dazzling story-within-a-story describes a 1940 round of golf with a mysterious woman who lost a valuable ring. The author seems uncertain how an iPod works but reveals an expertise with machine guns. His fickle memory frustrates and bemuses him. Sometimes he can recall only sensory images; sometimes the story unreeling in his mindskips, stops, fades, dissolves into something else. In several of his most appealing passages, he writes about the fictions that memory fashions. Graceful and deeply felt.