Customer Reviews

Westward Ha!

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4 star:		(3)
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One of the funniest travelogues I've read; laugh-out-aloud-as-you-read writing. Written in the mid-40s, before the advent of political correctness, no one, irrespective of culture, race or country is spared his biting, sarcastic wit. Brilliant narrative with fantastic vocabulary. A must read. I now have to get my hands on Eastward Ha!

The drawings of Al Hirschfeld perfectly compliment S.J. Perelman's writing. The work of both men shows what astute observers they were of human behavior. With this work, and in their other collaborations, they draw caricatures that are not one-dimensional, and are instead more like snapshots of the human condition, flaws and all.

S.J. Perelman's writing is best described as finely crafted comedy. And what that means is that he loves words, he loves wordplay and he loves metaphor and Mr. Perelman works hard to share that love with his readers. Do yourself a favor. Start your Perelman collection today.

I read this book decades ago, and I can still laugh when I remember it. If you want to laugh at/with city folks who go to the country, this is a great one.

Perelman is one of America's great Twentieth Century prose stylists--the quintessential New Yorker columnist when that magazine set literary style. The texture of his writing is obviously unique--clang association abetted by immense vocabulary and an eye that never forgot anything it noticed. But there's more going on. What we have here is a mind in the act of making the mind, a lively intellect using everything as fodder for the imagination, even imagination itself. Sure, there's a heap of artist performing FOR himself, with reader as voyeur, but it's a first-rate artist transforming reality into something more satisfying than fact. His writing parodies the magazine "short story" form. And it's convoluted, to the point of menace. But these willful distortions make the essence of his experience incarnate by taking its transactions to the level of the truly bizarre, like Jonathan Winters or Hunter Thompson. This isn't easy reading, but its method--stimulus for its own sake--is intense beyond belief. And there's value in it as history, given that his circumnavigation happened in 1947, two years after WWII. The world wasn't the same, and he noticed. More importantly, if he had it to do again, he wouldn't. His writing is caviar: a little is a treat, a plateful sickens.

You've got to be on your toes when reading this book, Westward, Ho. His cunning turn of phrase catches you at times to where you aren't sure if he's being facitous or did it really happen as he says. He was called the wittiest writer of his generation and was a favorite of the masses.