Essays from the award-winning New Yorker writer and author of This Old Man: โWitty, worldly, deeply elegiac, andโฆheartbreaking.โโThe Boston Globe
For more than fifty years, as both editor of and contributor for The New Yorker, Roger Angell has honed a reputation as a master of the autobiographic essayโsharp-witted, plucky, and at once nostalgic and unsentimental.
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In Let Me Finish, Angell reflects on a remarkable life (while admitting to not really remembering the essentials) and on its influences large and smallโfrom growing up in Prohibition-era New York, to his boyhood romance with baseball, to crossing paths with such twentieth-century luminaries as Babe Ruth, John Updike, Joe DiMaggio, S.J. Perelman, and W. Somerset Maugham. He discusses his dread of Christmas, a revealing recurring dream, and his stepfather, E.B. White. He recalls glorious images from the movies he saw as a child (for which Angell has a nearly encyclopedic memory), the sheer bliss of sailing off the coast of Maine, and the even greater pleasure of heading home to the perfect 6 p.m. vodka martini.
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Personal, reflective, funny, delightfully random, and disarming, this is a unique collection of scenes from a life by the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Game, โone of the most entertaining and gracious prose stylists of hisโฆgenerationโ (Time).
โA lovely book and an honest oneโฆabout loyalty and love, about work and play, about getting on with the cards that life deals you. It's also a genuinely grown-up book, a rare gem indeed in our pubescent age.โโThe Washington Post
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