What I’m getting at here is the old phrase “a dog’s breakfast,” because that’s what this book is. It was different each morning, but might contain a last chunk of pot roast or ham hock, plus gravy, from the previous night’s dinner table, a scraping of scrambled eggs, a slice or two of stale bread, leftover lima beans or spinach, a fresh but limp carrot, a splash of milk, and a half-bitten doughnut.

I can recall another era when every dog took a quick first look into his dish, to see what was in there. Employing the kind of homely image we associate with his stepfather, Angell neatly characterizes the resulting hodgepodge: It’s one of those miscellanies in which you are invited to read at whim, never sure what the next page might bring.

And third, he quickly established himself as probably the most admired baseball columnist in the business.Īll these aspects of Angell’s career are on display in this retrospective collection of appreciations, reminiscences, reviews, light verse, letters, and baseball pieces. (He also, as we learn here, rejected around twenty thousand manuscripts.) Second, for many years he wrote the annual “Greetings, Friends!” Christmas poem, a conglomeration of couplets cleverly built around the names of people who were newsworthy in the year just ending. Pritchett, Donald Barthelme, and Ann Beattie. As a result, when Angell recalls his childhood and youth, he remembers New Yorker galleys piled around the house, the sound of typing from White’s study, and parties where you might chat with James Thurber.Īngell is probably best known for three reasons: First, as a longtime New Yorker fiction editor, he shepherded hundreds of stories into the magazine by authors as various as V. He literally grew up with the magazine, his mother, Katharine White, being its first fiction editor and his stepfather, E. Roger Angell is now ninety-five and pretty much the last staffer at the New Yorker to have been part of its golden age.

What's Best For You by Judie Angell