Customer Reviews

Friends Talking in the Night: Sixty Years of Writing for The New Yorker

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A well-organized personal romp through years with the NYer, and interesting side- trips along the way. Perhaps not as palatable as other books connected to the New Yorker's history and legacy, but a good read for those of us who can't get enough.

This is an extraordinary selection of a wide variety of pieces by the New Yorker's revered Philip Hamburger. (He was the original and only Our Man Stanley in The Talk of the Town pages.) Each piece is subtly and elegantly written with a clarity, mirth and lightness of touch that always breathes and seems effortless. His range is extraordinary -- from portraits of esteemed judges, to romps with tenacious delicatessen waiters during wartime to surreal visits to American cities in the middle of the twentieth century -- Mr Hamburger combines an unabashedly cosmopolitan, liberal sensibility with a madcap, Marx Brothers' glee in the unexpected. He was a brilliant chronicler of his times, a delightful comic voice that punctured all pretension and there is not a wasted word in any of his writing. He is among the best of The New Yorker writers, right up there with Mitchell, Liebling and White. Buy this book, open it when you have a moment of liesure and read something luminous late into the night. Philip Hamburger is a warm and generous guide. All writers have something to learn from his effervescent prose. Keep it by your bed and dip into it when you're tired of cliches and weary from heavy handed preaching. He was one of Harold Ross' favorites. Now we know why. Let's hope there is more of his work coming our way. Publishers take note.

A well-organized personal romp through years with the NYer, and interesting side- trips along the way. Perhaps not as palatable as other books connected to the New Yorker's history and legacy, but a good read for those of us who can't get enough.

I'm a great fan of the (old pre-Tina) New Yorker and was really looking forward to this book. It seems to be a selection of the author's worst pieces in the last 60 years. Not up to the old New Yorker standards at all. Not to mention being a bit trendy-lefty (the pieces on the Kennedy an Reagan inaugurals blast any hope of objectivity, and the Clinton election piece is nauseating). Also the type is too large and there is far too much white space, just padding out the length of this thing. Pass, buy Thurber's Years With Ross instead.