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Let Me Finish Hardcover – May 8, 2006

by Roger Angell (Author)

38 customer reviews

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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.

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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: Harcourt; 1st edition (May 8, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0151013500
ISBN-13: 978-0151013500
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.2 x 8.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 38 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #690,234 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1193 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Journalists
- #4101 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors
- #8807 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Historical > United States

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Owl

A Remembrance of Things Past

September 6, 2013

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"Let Me Finish" would be interesting as snapshots from the last half of the 20th century, even if the reader knows little about Angell's illustrious career as a sports-writer and New Yorker fiction editor & that E. B. White was his step-father. These connections add much, to be sure, but the "Let Me Finish" stories can stand on their own. Angell tells about the spring and summer of a long-gone world: the New Yorker Magazine in its heyday, the post World War II days, and the adventures of a youth & then man mostly in New York City and Maine. The writing is smooth as a Martini, well-chilled & generously refilled.

In his mid-80s, Roger Angell brought together anecdotes from his personal and professional life. His mother, Katharine Sargeant White of the New Yorker, left his father, Ernest Angell, a well-to-do lawyer, under circumstances that awarded custody of the two children to the husband. Almost immediately after the divorce, she married a considerably younger man, E. B. ("Andy") White. Roger and his sister visited the Whites on weekends and vacations, as well as others from a clan intricately cobbled together from divorces and re-marriages.

"Let Me Finish" offers 17 chapters, loosely chronological, beginning when Angell was about eight. The last chapters reflect on the deaths of a troubled writer he edited, of his parents, of his friends, and his feelings as one likely to catch the next train himself.

There are some cheerful memories, including "Dry Martini," "We Are Fam-ilee," "Movie Kid," "Ancient Mariner," and "At the Comic Weekly" shining the spotlight on New Yorker worthies such as Harold Ross & Emily Hahn (what a woman!). In "Permanent Party" he volunteers for the Army, winding up as a instructor on the Browning .50 caliber machine gun (rather like "The Naming of Parts"), and marries his first wife, Evelyn.

"Let Me Finish" feels like going through boxes of old pictures with your grandfather. Angell remembers the names & stories of all the people in these photos, some of whom are familiar to you though most are not. He tells you their stories, honorably reminding you when others differ in their views, particularly when he speaks of his father's character. One knows these are only a few of a lifetime of such tales, but is not sure if he'd selected the incidents most important to him or the ones he thought you'd most like to hear. Possibly the latter, since little is told of his second wife & his children. This uncertainty is among the differences between Angell's my-life-through-stories and what a full-on biography might show.

Reader Alert: There is a "Great Gatsby" quality to this book because Roger Angell's world involved private schools, yachts small & larger, trips to Europe, dinners with the likes of Marietta Tree & Somerset Maugham, city residences around New York's 88th street and the expansive country places, as well as household servants. One chapter, "La Vie en Rose" which starts with Angell companionably pe*ing in Ditchley with Ronald Tree & Edward VIII's close friend, old Fruity, I'd initially thought was a humorous or at least satirical send-up, but, nope: Angell is just telling about how it was for him, Not a world of clear sunny days personally perhaps, but stormy externalities such as the Depression and struggles for civil rights are mentioned primarily as they affected his lawyer father.

"Let Me Finish" seems intended to give pleasure, a book in which many people Angell loved and honored are remembered perhaps as kindly as possible, rather like the thank you speeches on receiving an award. For those who cherish "Charlotte's Web," the chapter, "Andy," is in itself a reason for reading "Let Me Finish." Among the anecdotes, in chapters such as this, there are wisdom & mellowness.

A fine value at used book prices. Readers can expect several pleasant evenings sharing the remembrances of times past with a man we may be happy to know now, even if we didn't before we began reading, "One spring morning when I was seven going on eight...

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Frank Hopkins

Great story of a writer working as an editor in the New Yorker magazine.

July 19, 2016

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Enjoyable look at a writer's career at the New Yorker magazine. The narrative brings back many memories of growing up in New York. I highly recommend the book to those who are interested in reading about the life of writers.

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Robert M.

Super book by one the New Yorker's greatest writers on ...

September 10, 2015

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Super book by one the New Yorker's greatest writers on baseball. It came almost instantaneously like a trick arranged by Einstein! Thanks for excellent service!
Robert M.

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e s r

At the New Yorker

August 11, 2014

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Memoirs and memory of a long time member of the New Yorker "family". If you are a NYer reader, this is a must. If not, it is probably a good introduction to a very special segment of the New York literary life. Some of the pieces are nostalgic. All witty. Some funny. A few sad. Good mix.

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Pecksniff

like E B White

December 17, 2017

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A vivid recollection of a life woven through the lives of famous and not so famous people, like E B White, centered in the world of the New Yorker in the first half of the 21st century.

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P. Juncker

Five Stars

May 27, 2018

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Great book.

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Seattle Molly

To my delighted surprise, the book is as charming and intelligent ...

March 28, 2016

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What a treasure! I had seen Roger Angell interviewed recently. To my delighted surprise, the book is as charming and intelligent as it's author. Great price. Great condition. Would definitely buy from this seller again.Two thumbs up all around.

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Kurt

Another memoir from one of our most elegant writers

September 21, 2017

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Oh, the places he's been, and the people he knows.

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