I was looking for a light, fun, eminently readable summer book, and this one really fit the bill. This one contains fond, well-written portraits of Angell's parents, his famous stepfather, and his editors and his co-workers at the New Yorker. It's got digressions on some of his favorite things, which include baseball, martinis, the automobile, the movies, sailing, and golf. We hear about what it was like to travel in Europe before the airplane flooded the continent with tourists and what it was like to spend summers in Maine during the Depression. We hear about the author's creditable but bloodless military career in the Second World War and about how he went from being a wannabe writer to being a real-deal writer and how E.B. White went from being a real-deal writer to being a real-deal farmer. Although Angell's rolodex wasn't nearly as extensive as Truman Capote's, we hear about a lot of other notable twentieth century writers and personalities, many of whom got to know in their off-hours as they hung around or passed through New York and others that he personally published and edited. We hear, in short, about an pleasant, interesting, privileged, and extraordinarily lengthy life. Angell tells the stories he's got to tell very well. it's not for nothing that his mother's second husband was the man who gave us "The Elements of Style": his prose is economical, direct, precise, and elegant. I suspect that while writing these pieces he was becoming one of the last individuals in a generation that was slowly sliding out of view. When writing on cars, or going to the ballgame, or corresponding with his New Yorker colleagues, he seems to want to give the reader a sense of how certain things were done before a cascade of technological advances changed them irrevocably. Angell's hardly a nostalgist -- it's clear that he's given some thought to how memory can be, by turns, both true and tricky. But as I read "Let Me Finish," I sort of started to think of the author as a kind of last witness, and I wonder if he did, too. We're talking about a guy, after all, who saw the Giants play at the Polo Grounds and regularly went to lunch with William Shawn on the way to becoming a centenarian. Frankly, I'm just glad that he got it all down on paper, and that he did it so well.

I suppose I should warn readers that, if it wasn't already obvious, "Let Me Finish" is a book for a certain type of reader. Angell is responsible as anyone for the New Yorker's literary and cultural aesthetic, and readers who don't much cotton to that erudite, cosmopolitan, expensively educated, and left-leaning worldview should probably steer clear of this one altogether. To give the man some credit, Angell has no illusions about the role that money and privilege played in his life, and he doesn't dwell on it or get defensive. He was born something of a New York Brahmin and spent time as both a free-spirited a boho private school kid and an Ivy Leaguer. But it's hard to get away from the fact that many of the experiences he relates in "Let Me Finish" are fairly exclusive to the caste which the author belonged. Even so, Angell works to impress upon the reader that money and connections can only protect you from so much. This point is emphasized in the book's last, and perhaps best, essay, "Hard Lines," in which the author tells us about a good friend of his who died young, leaving behind two daughters. Nor is this an aberration, exactly: at other points, we hear about schoolmates lost in the War, friends lost to drink, and a surprising number of divorces and remarriages. "Hard lines," we learn was a college-kid phrase he once used to telegraph that it's usually best to just bear up and get on with it. The author wrote and edited, and, perhaps most importantly, just got on with it for a hundred years. This isn't exactly a heavy read, but it is, in its own small way, an intelligent and inspiring one. ( )

Let's see...we've got thoughtful stories about (among other things) baseball, parents and children; touring France after WWII, E.B. White, William Maxwell, martinis, friendships, and Emily Hahn (must add her books to my list). I just talked myself up to 5 stars. ( )

Wonderful. Roger Angell's memoir, arranged loosely by subject, wanders happily through time, with frequent admissions of the whimsies and vagaries of memory. As he says, “Memory is fiction – an anecdotal version of some scene or past event we need to store away for present or future use,” and readers may well be led to dig into their own archives and to wonder why certain scenes have “stuck” and not others, and why certain memories are shaped as they are. I enjoyed all of the chapters, including those on sailing and baseball, which is a strong testimony to the engaging nature of Angell's writing. His writing is vivid, and there is a sense of immediacy as he seems to examine each memory as it rises up with curiosity, sympathy, and appreciation. Very early on I was taken aback by his story of a day out with his mother and her “lover,” Andy White, but as the book progressed I got over this shock and better recognized the complexities of the lives of these impressive characters. (I recently read E.B. White on Dogs, and really enjoyed the different perspective offered here on White and his family by Angell, his stepson.)

Throughout the book are memories of friends and family who are now gone, each gloriously individual and quirky, presented with dignity and humor. At eighty-six a memoirist is entitled, it seems to me, to occasionally wax a bit melancholy, but Angell never abuses this privilege. His editorial skills have served him well here in selecting the perfect combination of stories – the amusing and the tragic, the heartwarming and the intriguing – to convey the pleasures and pains that must inevitably make up a long life well savored. ( )

A series of memories constituting a memoir, by the baseball writer and New Yorker fiction editor. He writes about the romance of driving across country in the 20s and 30s, about the movies during the golden age in the late 30s and early 40s, “when the studios were cranking out five hundred films each year” and he went every day after school and before his father came home from work. He writes about his father, whose bitter divorce from Roger’s mother Katharine eventually resulted in Roger and his older sister’s fairly unhappy five days a week with their father and happier weekends with their mother and her new husband E. B. (Andy) White. He writes about playing and watching baseball in his childhood. “Sports were different in my youth—a series of events to look forward to and then to turn over in memory, rather than a huge, omnipresent industry, with its own economics and politics and crushing public relations.” He describes a subway trip with a friend and Angell’s king snake, to the Bronx Zoo for a “Consultation” about the snake’s imperfect shedding of its last skin. Another chapter tells about interesting family members such as Aunt Elsie, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who was wounded in WWI and almost supported herself with her literary biographies and articles for magazines, but looked down on her sister’s work at The New Yorker, and Hildegarde, who walked naked on a Provincetown beach, wrote a biography of Simon Bolivar, married an oil man named Granville Smith with whom she bought a sheep and cattle farm in Missouri, and when she died was almost immediately supplanted by Evelyn Dewey, John Dewey’s daughter. A whole chapter is devoted to Andy White, who married Katharine in 1929. Another chapter celebrates the martini, yet another details Angell’s stateside war experiences of early marriage and teaching the Browning .50 caliber machine gun to new inductees. Travel in Europe and en route via liner is the subject of “La Vie en Rose.” Angell writes about the pleasures of sailing.
In a chapter titled “At the Comic Weekly”—what Harold Ross once called The New Yorker—Angell talks about Ross (“It’s surprising that Ross never saw himself as a writer”), William Maxwell, William Shawn, Emily Hahn (“perfect pitch in the little aria of the casual”), and Gardner Botsford. Angell and his wife visit area graveyards, including their own plot in Brooklin, Maine. The concluding chapters are downbeat: In “Jake,” Angell writes about a fiction writer, John Murray, whose second story had not yet appeared in The New Yorker when he committed suicide, and in “Hard Lines”—the expression is the equivalent of “Tough Luck”—Angell talks about his friend Walker Field, dead of a glioblastoma at thrity-eight, and some other losses. ( )

Roger Angell, at 88, is a lucky man. He thinks so himself. He's survived his knocks, his various unhapinesses - divorced parents, a divorce of his own, friends gone but not forgotten - and he appreciates what he has now, as well as what life has dealt him along the way. "Hard lines" is a phrase recalled from his college days, a shouted or whispered expression that could mean anything from "Buck up," or "Get over it, to "I'm so very sorry." Another reviewer noted he was glad that Angell spent more time talking about his childhood and youth than he did on his days at The New Yorker, where he worked as an editor for over fifty years. Me too, I guess, because remembrances from childhood and young adult years when we're all so fulla juice are often the most interesting. But when, in the latter part of the book, Angell does in fact get around to discussing the magazine and all the luminaries and characters who passed through its doors and pages, that part too is intensely interesting, especially if you're a "book person," as I have always been. I found myself taking notes, writing down names of authors and book titles I'd never heard of. And a few of those are already in my cart, waiting until I can sneak another Amazon order past my wife. This is not just a lot of fond reminiscing about "the good old days." This is memoir writing of the very highest calibre. I knew before I began this book that E.B. White was Angell's stepfather, so I expected to learn a bit more about that famous author of Charlotte's Webb and Stuart Little. And I did - in fact there is a whole chapter on "Andy" White - but I found myself perhaps even more interested in what Angell tells about his real father, Ernest Angell (called "Serious Cupid" by his school chums), a not particularly successful lawyer. What impressed me most about Angell's father was the seriousness with which he took his role as a "single parent," something rare among men in the 1920s and -30s. This is such a fascinating book I'm not quite sure what else to point out. I was interested to learn that Angell spent his summers for most of his life near Brooklin, ME, not far from Sargentville, ME, where writer Doris Grumbach plunked herself to spend the "end" of her life, and where she has resided mostly happily for the past 20 years. Grumbach is now 90 (and I just read two of her memoirs). I wonder if the two know each other. Perhaps one of the things I like most about Roger Angell is that despite a very successful professional life he refuses to take himself too seriously, but yet he recognizes the seriousness of what he has lived through and what might still be coming. Here's an excerpt from the "Hard Lines" section:

"It's my guess that we cling to the harsher bits of the past not just as a warning system to remind us that the next Indian raid or suddenly veering, tower-bound 757 is always waiting, but as a passport to connect us to the rest of the world, whose horrors are available each morning and evening on television or in the TIMES. And the cold moment that returns to mind and sticks there unbidden, may be preferable to the alternative and much longer blank spaces ... Like it or not, 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."

At 88, Roger Angell may be on the downslope career-wise. However, as a writer he's at the top of his game - no "geezer-ness" in sight. He clued me in on a couple of other former New Yorker memoirs from Gardner Botsford and Emily Hahn, which I look forward to reading. But mostly I am grateful Angell has finally told his own story, honestly, without bitterness - even about its painful memories - and with humor and flair. This is one very terrific book. ( )