Amazon.com Review
Cantankerous cultural icon Andy Rooney has come up with a twist on a concept for his latest book: instead of printing letters that people have written to him, he has collected his own responses, prefaced with occasional editorial notes to get the reader up to speed. All together, they make an interesting chronicle of his career, spanning everything from his missive to CBS management's 1950 request to swear that he had never been a member of the Communist party to his response to a modern conspiracy theorist. Rooney is at his best when his sly deadpan humor comes out, as when he replies to the editor of a celebrity cookbook with a recipe for baked potato ice cream. Just as enjoyable for other reasons are the pieces in which he becomes almost breathtaking in his cussedness, stubbornly waging an extensive battle against the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance and mercilessly ripping apart the letters of a fifth-grade class. Regular viewers of
60 Minutes will be gratified to see that even in short letters, Rooney has a tendency to take sudden detours into his trademark quotidian observations ("Of all the postal abbreviations, MI is the worst."). Less frequent but more prominent are his forays into the maddeningly illogical, as when he refuses to understand why being a homosexual is not the same kind of risky behavior as being a cigarette smoker, or when he defends his linguistically naive statement that English is "better" than other languages. Ah, but that's all part of his peculiar charm, isn't it?
--Ali Davis
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Rooney's distinctive whining voice comes through in this collection of his letters to fans, friends, CBS executives, tax collectors and others. The popular TV commentator and curmudgeon-in-residence sallies forth with ripostes at shady car dealers, astrologers, lawyers, modern poetry, deceptive packaging, tobacco industry duplicity and George Patton ("the most over-rated general of WW II"). While these seem like easy targets, at least in this epistolary shooting gallery (which contains only Rooney's correspondence, not the letters that prompted them), he occasionally sounds off even more forthrightly here than on television. Explaining his agnosticism in a very personal letter to his four children, Rooney states that religion is illogical, impedes the progress of civilization and doesn't make people nicer to each other. In a letter to the Advocate, he apologizes for his insensitive broadcast remarks about homosexuality, then pours fuel on the fire by vouchsafing his opinion that homosexuality is "a behavioral aberration" and that he finds gay sex repugnant--but adds that he has had many gay friends and denies he's homophobic. On the lighter side, Rooney celebrates the pleasures of home and family, watching football, drinking bourbon, banging away on old typewriters and woodworking. Entertaining and witty, but also at times pontificating and arch, these letters span half a century, encompassing his struggles as a freelance magazine writer, his work as a CBS documentary scriptwriter and his bombing missions as a WWII pilot. Besides the replies to 60 Minutes watchers, there are conversational missives to Will Rogers, Bill Moyers, Helen Gurley Brown, E.B. White, Eric Sevareid, Walter Annenberg, Peggy Noonan and Barry Goldwater. Though devoted fans may enjoy this breezy compendium, the overall impression is of slight material and too much self-indulgent ephemera.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
