Customer Reviews

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

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I'm not usually a fan of The New Yorker. I can never get through the whole thing and when trying, often feel bogged down. But, everyone says The New Yorker represents good writing, so I picked up For The Fun Of It to see if it would actually show me what "good writing" is. It did!

This book is filled with fun vignettes from The New Yorker starting in the 1920s and going through the year 2000. Each piece is a page or two and describes an interesting encounter with a New York personality.

You can read about the store that gave Mae West her corsets (1930), Gimbels' venture into live pony-selling (1947), what taxi drivers think is funny (1977) and about "a terrible new smell" that turned up in Tribeca (1992). Or read about "The Guy Who Makes President Clinton Funny"(2000.) And these examples barely scratch the surface. The pieces are written by such notables as James Thurber, Lillian Ross, Brendan Gill, Robert Benchley and even Johnny Carson ("Proverbs According to Dennis Miller"(2000)).

There are one or two clunkers, but they're in a definite minority. I really recommend this book to anyone who appreciates and likes to read about the quirky, creative and independent personalities that comprise New York City and, what the heck, America. The book's span of 70 years makes it even more fun and interesting. This book would be a great gift, too.

What a wonderful read! I am a huge fan of The New Yorker and especially "Talk of the Town" and this book captures the essence of both - as well as the very essence that is the extraordinarily unique New York culture - and brings it all together between two covers. An absolutely terrific gift for the literary fiction lover! And yourself!

Or maybe airplane reading. For those not familiar with The Talk of the Town feature in the New Yorker, it is a short, 1000 word-or-so essay on some feature of the current NY scene. The writing is often clever(rarely, too clever eg Garrison Keillor, but this could be predicted) and many great writers have taken a turn at it.

Part of the charm of the volume are the older pieces where now-famous names and places are introduced as newcomers and one gets a real feel of Manhattan in the 20s and 30s.

This is a wonderful book. A compilation of pieces from The Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker spanning nine (!) decades, this is a social history of our nation and of New York. The Fun of It sat forgotten on my shelf for a few months, but I noticed it after the WTC disaster and began reading. What wonderful therapy. Some stories are poignant, others informative, still others laugh-out-loud hilarious. But all are elegant, first class writing. A great book for the bedside or bathroom, it can be dipped into at random and enjoyed for a few minutes or a few hours. Do yourself a favor: read it.

Ross, a capable but often pedestrian reporter and writer (her quirks and tics quickly grow tiresome), has overstuffed the book with specimens of her own "Talk" pieces. Much more talented "Talk" writers are woefully unrepresented here.

I noticed that indeed the editor managed to cram in some of her own writings. A few of those are unremarkable compared to the others, but the selection overall is very good. There are tons of fantastic talk stories in terms of the way it is written and the `substance' of its subject and/or personalities discussed. The selection criteria seems more on the latter actually. Whether it's the visit of Dali in New York, encounter with Fellini, or autograph signing event by Gtde Stein, tou will catch a glimpse of the idiosyncraci... masterfully chronicled in under 1000ish words.

And it takes very short time needed to digest and appreciate each piece. Each one can perhaps also be studied as specimen of very tightly edited pieces. The introduction is also fantastic as it is as a discussion of the magazine's history.

Looking into the subjects of each short piece, you also get a glimpse at New York history within the context of personalities that visited or events that happened and caught the crosshairs of the magazine. Sometime the whole US history can also be put side by side... now with the reader now having the benefit of hindsight what happened to these persons afterwards.

If I had a wish that is only partially fulfilled: I was actually hoping for some more humorous criticism and satires... there are only some mild ones. The tone of most articles lives on straight reportage.

Now, there are better talk of the town pieces since its publication. We need a sequel. The book is fantastic, but it is already clamoring for a 2nd helping.

Really! Each essay is one to two pages of delightful, insightful look into the minds of the New Yorker from the 1920s to 2000. Yes, the essays are humorous, but even more entertaining was looking at what the world was like 'then'. It really is like glimpsing a piece of cultural history. That each essay is so short means that it's perfect for sampling when you have only a few minutes to spare.