Liebling abroad

By A.J. Liebling

Book Overview

HARDCOVER. Playboy Press, (1981). Intro. by Raymond Sokolov. (4 books in one volume)x, 672 pages, cloth & boards. Text clean and unmarked, former owner's name on front endpaper, in dust jacket, light... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872236439
• ISBN13: 9780872236431
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Wideview Books
• Length: 672 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Not to be missed

A.J. Liebling was one of the greatest journalists of the 20th Century and a decent man to boot. This collection includes indelible vignettes of people at war and in the aftermath of war. His dispatches, most published in the New Yorker, remind us that everything is a mess when you are in the middle of it, not tied off and neat as history makes it later on. Of course, you need not give a fig for WWII or horses or boxing or Calvados or oysters or anything else Liebling writes about. You can just love the language, and wonder at his acuteness. This guy lived a more vivid life than Hemingway or any of the other macho blusterers because he kept his eyes open, knew when to keep his trap shut, and cared about the details. He is never missing but he never poses. It's rare to find a writer with heart who is not sentimental. I'll just cite one passage. Remember, he's writing about the fall of France, the invasion of North Africa, Normandy (and the politics, the generals, the stiffs in the front line) but makes time for this miniature: "There was an extravagance about the gestures of the Poles I knew that would have repelled me if I had encountered it in a work of fiction, where I can always recognize an implausibility. What could be more trite than the story of the impoverished nobleman [refugee in London in 1940] who borrows his arrears of room rent to save himself from being dispossessed and who stops on his way home and buys a bottle of champagne with the money? It sounds like the theme of an inferior Lettre de Mon Moulin. Except that I knew the protagonist. He was the Pole who once told me that he had been faithful all his life to one woman: 'Any fragile blond with a morbid expression.'" Those last seven words are worth half of mid-century literature and most of its movies. And you will enjoy the Calvados. Get this book.