Volume 51, Number 18 · November 18, 2004
A Great Reporter at Large
By Russell Baker
Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer
by A.J. Liebling, with an introduction by David Remnick
North Point, 534 pp., $27.50
The Telephone Booth Indian
by A.J. Liebling, with an introduction by Luc Sante
Broadway Books, 241 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
by A.J. Liebling, with an introduction by James Salter
North Point, 167 pp., $13.00 (paper)
The Sweet Science
by A.J. Liebling, with a foreword by Robert Anasi
North Point, 267 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were. From the 1920s through the Eisenhower years modesty was a clearly defined style in the American press, but it was already fading when Liebling died in 1963. By then what had once been 'the press' had turned into 'the media' and contracted the imperial state of mind, which is never conducive to modesty, whether in tsars of all the Russias or Washington correspondents.
Review, 3677 words
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