Syndicated columnist Calvin Trillin, a Kansas City native and sometime visitor to Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, offered this 1990 collection of some of his best columns from the late 1980s. While Trillin is not a political columnist per se, some of these columns do deal with the Reagan and Bush (Sr.) administrations and political campaigns, along with such 80s figures as Michael Milliken, Gary Hart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Imelda Marcos, and Manuel Noriega (not to mention Noriega's red underwear and his evil voodoo tamales). Trillin also covers more everyday topics, like family vacations (and Packing Greatness), empty-nest syndrome, and three a.m. car alarms. Since this was written over 20 years ago, some of it was a little out-of-date, but some topics were strangely similar to issues being dealt with today - the invasion of Grenada by the Reagan administration, and of Noriega's Panama by the Bush administration, bring to mind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in our recent history, for example.
I enjoyed Trillin's easy-going, dry sense of humor, and the shortness of the columns (average of 2-3 pp.) lends them to easy reading. Trillin is one of my favorite columnists, and I recommend the book. By the way, this was another MULSA book sale remainder!
No comments:
Post a Comment