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Looking Back (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – February 29, 2004

4.5 out of 5 stars 14

From his youthful days as a delivery boy for William Randolph Hearst’s Baltimore newspapers through his many years as a journalist and commentator, Russell Baker has been a keen observer of American politics and culture. Now, in these eleven essays, all originally published in The New York Review of Books, he looks back on a group of iconic public figures from his own past.

Profiled here are presidents (Lyndon Johnson feuding with Robert F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon in his grasping, spectral exile), would-be presidents (Eugene V. Debs and Barry Goldwater, “gentlemen fallen among brutes”), and those who set their sights on something besides the presidency (Joe DiMaggio, and Martin Luther King, “the one indisputably great American of the century’s second half”).

Undeluded by the roar of what he calls “our national engines of ballyhoo, bushwah, and baloney,” Russell Baker reflects on the strange fascination that these larger-than-life characters have held for the American imagination. With an elegiac yet shrewd sense of their accomplishments both enduring and ephemeral, he traces the impressions they left on twentieth-century America—and on him.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A refresher course in American politics and culture."
Tampa Tribune & Times

"[Baker displays] an unflinching desire to observe lives as they were actually lived, not as they were created by Hollywood."
The Boston Globe

"Baker wrote wonderfully, with perfect, witty sentences that could make you stop and read them again."
The Boston Globe

"[Baker has] scholarly erudition, stylistic flair, and an ability to sweep through all manner of culture high and low that recalls writers like Edmund Wilson and George Orwell."
Boston Phoenix

About the Author

Russell Baker is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His books include The Good Times, Growing Up, and Looking Back.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ New York Review Books (February 29, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 212 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1590170881
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1590170885
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.1 x 0.61 x 7.95 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 out of 5 stars 14

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Russell Baker
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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
14 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2014
This is a collection of essays that Russell Baker contributed to the New York Review of Books in the 1990s. For those too young to recall, Bake wrote a political column—usually satiric—for the New York Times, and for anyone, like me, who grew up around New York in the 1960s and 70s, the days when his pieces appeared in the paper were always brighter. We would clip them, read them aloud, save them, and mail them to friends. His memoir, Growing Up, is one of the finest in American literature. While these essays were at the whim of the editors of the New York Review of Books, who would send him books that they hoped would strike his fancy, they hold together well as a book, given that most touch on the general themes of American culture and politics before and after mid-century. With grace and his penetrating light touch, Baker writes about Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys, Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon, all men he covered as a reporter for the Times. Beyond these political stalwarts, he includes chapters about Joe DiMaggio, Eugene V. Debs, and the high priest of the New Yorker magazine, William Shawn. I don't want to pretend that all the essays were written with this book in mind, and to be sure, in stretches, the volume lacks some central direction. Nevertheless, each page flashes Baker's wit and insight, and for that alone the book is well worth the price of admission.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2016
I love Russell's writing and his story is heartwarming. So sorry that he is gone.

Charlotte Landis
2 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2018
This is a compilation of book reviews. It is occasionally insightful and sometimes interesting. The essays that were best concerned LBJ's relationship with Robert Kennedy and another about Nixon. The rest were pretty cursory and Baker doesn't seem to know quite what to say about Taylor Branch's "Pillar of Fire". I wish this had been better.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2016
Great to have Baker's take on these events. Good review also.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2019
I preferred Russell Baker's other books: GROWING UP and THE GOOD TIMES much, much more. There was a lot more human warmth and humor in those. This compilation lacks the feeling and human emotions that make the others so outstanding.