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Reporting At Wit's End: Tales From The New Yorker (2010)

by St. Clair McKelway(Favorite Author)

4.04 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

160819034X (ISBN13: 9781608190348)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Bloomsbury USA

review 1: Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a magazine called The New Yorker that published superb writing and made money doing it. That day, I fear, has passed; the magazine probably doesn't make money and I think its *superb* writing is thinner on the ground than once was the case. I am deeply grateful that it still exists and does all the very, very good publishing that it does.But oh me, oh my, for the times when A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and St. Clair McKelway were simply among the talent pool, and not standouts!This collection of McKelway's best pieces of character-driven, crime-reporting pieces from the 30s to the 60s illuminates one of the old New Yorker's best gifts to us, its future: Clear, lucid, beautiful prose about moments in time, people i... moren medias res, events not worthy of Historical Record but too...too...cool? weird? off-kilter? INTERESTING...to miss out on knowing, however briefly. It's a piece of Americana that the magazine doesn't do so much of anymore, though it's by no means a vanished idea in those not-so-hallowed pages anymore. It's just amazing to me how good The New Yorker remains, in this wildly different landscape from that of its heyday.When I got my copy of this elephantine tome, I quailed at the sheer bulk of it. I self-impose a duty to read books that I review twice. Anything that a writer has spent time, sweat, and possibly money on creating, I can't justify responding to in writing with a glancing blow, a negligible investment of one trip through, that will no doubt leave many incomplete and unsatisfied crannies unexplored.THIS book, I thought, *has* to be the exception! 1,240 pages, if read twice?! AAARGH!I loved it all. I can't tell you to read it twice, I don't think most people would listen, but I can tell you that Adam Gopnik, the present-day New Yorker writer who edited the collection, chose very wisely and you will not find your attention flagging. I myownself love the piece "Firebug-Catcher" the best of them all for its bygone Brooklyn setting. I feel very, very sure that any LT member who procures this book will find a lot of joy in reading it because of its literary merits, because it's a glimpse into a past as dead as ancient Rome and just as full of fascinating characters, and most of all because it's just great value for money spent. Member rocketjk uses door-stoppers like this as "between" books, ones he reads a piece out of between other, shorter books, and that is just about the perfect way to read Reporting at Wit's End.An aside: Bloomsbury USA, the publishers of this book, are celebrating their tenth anniversary. Buy their books. They're a wonderful, wonderful publisher of terrific books: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Art of Losing, Diet for a Hot Planet, on and on. Show 'em some love with your dollars, and enable them to keep bringing us the good books they do.
review 2: Very good collection of New Yorker pieces from the 30s-60s. McKelway was an alcoholic and borderline insane sometimes, which shows up most clearly in The Edinburgh Caper.The portraits of a bushleague counterfeiter, a serial embezzler, and an arson detective are the standouts here. Also of interest is a firsthand account of McKelway's time doing public relations in the US Army Air Force with Curtis LeMay during the latter days of the bombing campaign on Japan. less

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