Just Enough Liebling

Rating:
Summary: An awesome writer
Review: A.J. Liebling is a quirky, funny, one-of-a-kind writer whom I adore. He's often mentioned in the same breath with Damon Runyon, and they both profile similar obscure wise guys in a clever offhanded idiom. (Runyon's prose is more caustic, and practically a new language.) But I found myself thinking of Mark Twain, too, and even the television program Seinfeld. Liebling will come up with something absolutely hilarious or some wonderfully turned phrase in the midst of a lot of pleasant-enough "nothing." He has the same way of deflating the grand and inflating the trivial that Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George have.

But even I couldn't finish one of these essays, and he's not going to be everybody's cup of tea. I almost bailed on the initial outpouring on the subject of food, but I'm glad I persevered. (I had recently read The Sweet Science and knew this would get better!) He does an extended riff on the idea that to really enjoy food one must have "just enough" money. With too much or too little money you won't be properly adventurous. Nice image, and unless I'm mistaken it applies to just about everything in life.

There is a great range of topics Liebling writes about. Food is one, and be forewarned that his approach is artistic rather than scientific. But also Paris, World War II, boxing, New York, the press, William Randolph Hearst, General Patton, Theodore Dreiser, Sugar Ray Robinson, Stalin, the Louisiana politician Earl Long. My favorite pieces are "Quest for Mollie," about a remarkable soldier in the North African theater, and "Ahab and Nemesis," about Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore.

These stories and many others are simply transcendant, they are so good. Excerpting him is like excerpting a couple of bars of a Brandenburg Concerto, but I'll run the risk. After he decides that Marciano and Moore match up fairly well with the greats of the past, he ends this particular story with a wonderful, lucid image: "...it proved that world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young."

Rating:
Summary: Just Perfect
Review: I read the review in the New York Review of Books and bought the book. I'm not disappointed. A. J. Liebling was just a wonderful writer!

Rating:
Summary: How can there ever be enough Liebling
Review: Is there ever enough Liebling? One of the classic observers of American life. If you have never read him, be prepared for a realy good time. A. J. Liebling was basically a reporter with a sense of observation that can only be called vibrant.

This book is a collection of some of his better work. About a third of the book covers World War II where he becan in France in 1939 and continued through a visit made after the war. This is reporting from the field, not to say anything about this unit doing this and that unit doing that, but about people. People not so different than you and I or out soldiers in Iraq.