Let Me Finish [Hardcover]

Roger Angell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2006

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 auto-biography in this unsentimental look at his early days as a boy growing up in Prohibition-era New York with a remarkable father; a mother, Katherine 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 eccentric relatives, his childhood love of baseball in the time of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and his vivid colleagues during his long career as a New Yorker writer and editor. Infused with both pleasure and sadness, Angell's disarming memoir also evokes a sensuous attachment to life's better moments.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* New Yorker readers have been savoring Angell's autobiographical essays every few months for the last three years. Now they can be read consecutively, and the effect is both less and more than a traditional autobiography: less because there is no attempt to tell the story of a life as a developing narrative, but more because the book unfolds like memories do, a single image crystallizing a traumatic event or encapsulating a period of years ("the look of the overgrown lawn and our knees oddly in a row," when Angell is told by his mother about her impending divorce). The topics of the individual essays range from baseball in the 1930s (Gehrig and Ruth in Yankee Stadium, Mel Ott and Bill Terry at the Polo Grounds) to friends, family, and colleagues at the New Yorker, where Angell, now in his eighties, has worked for 40 years and where his mother, Katherine, and stepfather, E. B. White, worked before him. His recollections of literary people are uniformly fascinating, as much for the low-key manner in which they are related as for the glimpses they offer into the private lives of such luminaries as William Maxwell and S. J. Perelman. The most memorable aspects of this captivating chronicle, however, are the purely personal memories. Describing his teenage attempt to become a screwball-throwing pitcher in the manner of Carl Hubbell, Angell notes that after he threw his arm out, he "took up smoking and irony in self-defense." The irony never left him; it flavors these graceful essays throughout, but it never tastes bitter. Instead, there is an endearing objectivity ("I've had a life sheltered by privilege, and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck") and a lingering sense of bemused surprise that so much can be remembered so fondly. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (May 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151013500
• ISBN-13: 978-0151013500
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,184,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fun collection of short vignettes looking back on one man's life, May 30, 2006

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Let Me Finish (Hardcover)

For connoisseurs of New Yorker fiction editor and contributor Roger Angell's celebrated writings on all things baseball (GAME TIME, A PITCHER'S STORY, LATE INNINGS, etc.), his latest offering will be a change of pace. This collection of short vignettes, which was written in the last three years and loosely tied together into memoir format, is both slower going (rightly so) yet more free-flowing than his previous books. Overflowing with remembrances of past events, familial anecdotes, New Yorker insides and general day-to-day musings, LET ME FINISH is both a pleasure to read and an insightful look into the nooks and crannies of one man's lifetime over the last 70 or so years.

Although many may find all of the chapters interesting merely as records of a life lived, there are a few sections that stand out above the rest. In "Romance," Angell beautifully illustrates America's love affair with the open road by recounting various car trips taken during his childhood. He perfectly captures the quiet freedom unleashed when behind the wheel or in the back of a moving vehicle and pinpoints one of those quintessential moments when all seems right in the world and full of promise: "There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn...Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a long trip; many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter."

Like many kids who grew up during the Prohibition era and the Depression, Angell was utterly bewitched with the burgeoning world of cinema. There was nothing quite like skipping school to sit in the delicious darkness of a movie theater, and every chance he got, he would treat himself to the latest double feature. Simple and sweet, the chapter entitled "Movie Kid" is pure delight and once again captures a period of time long since forgotten in the age of blockbuster films. "Anyone who was the wrong age or in the wrong place for this stuff --- my parents and my children, for instance, and even those who picked it up later from videos and American-studies classes --- never quite caught up. We were the lucky ones, we first citizens of film, and we trusted the movies for the rest of our lives."

Three of the most vivid and nostalgic chapters are "The King of the Forest," "Andy" and "Twice Christmas," in which Angell examines his roots. In "The King of the Forest," he pokes and prods at the memory of his father --- the aforementioned "King" in the title --- portraying him with an honesty and awe that only a son's gaze could muster. He lays bare his father's infidelities (a reason for his mother's departure) yet still manages to convey his utter respect and love for him as a father figure.

In "Andy," he gives due reverence to his stepfather, the renowned author and editor E. B. White (STUART LITTLE, CHARLOTTE'S WEB, THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE). By Angell's depiction, Andy seems like a kind man, full of wisdom, talent, and the one-of-a-kind hankering for words and sentiment that produced not only the industry's top guidebook for grammar and writing, but also one of the best children's books ever written. In "Twice Christmas," Angell marries --- or should I say divorces --- his two fathers by uniting them with the one thing they had in common: his mother. With almost unnatural clarity, he captures the awkward essence of growing up in a broken home by recounting the details of possibly the most important morning of a young boy's life --- Christmas morning --- first at his father's and then again, after an overstuffed and anxious taxi ride across town, at his mother's/Andy's.

Readers who light up at the mention of celebrity will delight in Angell's brief references to W. Somerset Maugham and Vladimir Nabokov, and will get a kick out of his recollections of fellow New Yorker staffers Charles McGrath, William Shawn, founder Harold Ross, William Mazwell and the like. But it is his dance with the familiar in LET ME FINISH that reaps its due reward. "Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around."

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very pleasurable escape, May 30, 2006

By 

Marilyn Jaye Lewis (Easton, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Let Me Finish (Hardcover)

I don't think its every writer's responsibility to tackle the harsh truths about life on earth--these things: war, famine, poverty, violence, racism, overall unfairness, grief and unhappiness--exist eternally. However, the personalities who "people" life are ephemeral and for the most part, if we're lucky, it's our relationship to those personalities and the times spent with them that make being alive on earth worthwhile. I think Roger Angell has captured those fleeting feelings and those tender personalities in a very emotionally satisfying way, regardless of whether or not he has lived a life of seeming privilege. These essays will deftly help you escape the world of CNN's Situation Room, et al, for awhile. The book will probably make you wish you could recall your own childhood memories in such fond detail, and it will certainly make you hope your own life will be remembered by others with such a sense of wistful tolerance and easy forgiveness.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Humor, Sadness, Excellent Little Stories, June 28, 2006

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Let Me Finish (Hardcover)

This biography of a sort is really a series of stories that reflect important parts of his life. Being a supurb writer his little vignettes are a mixture of humor, history, personal views, and whatever he wants to say. I think I liked the story of his Army Air Corp life during World War II the best. The idea of the Army losing his paperwork so that effectively he didn't exist sort of told me that the Army hadn't changed when I went in a generation later.

Angell is best known as a baseball writer and there's some baseball here, but there's a lot more. As he says, he didn't intend to write a biography, he just wrote a few stories about things in his past. Later on he looked at them and here was a book.

It's delightful reading. Not too serious, and he's not going to tell you 'I was born...' Born to well off, if not rich parents, he sums up his life: 'I've had a life sheltered by privilege, and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck.' That almost sums up the book as well.