Bøger af Calvin Trillin

"Calvin Trillin can write just about anything-and has. He covered the Civil Rights movement in the South for Time, chronicled stories from small towns and cities for The New Yorker, and wrote comic poetry for The Nation. He has been called "perhaps the finest reporter in America" (The Miami Herald), "our funniest food writer" (The New Yorker), and "one of the most brilliant humorists of our time" (Charleston Post and Courier). But one of his favorite subjects across the years-a superbly good fit for Trillin's unique mâelange of reportage and comedy-has been his own professional milieu: the American press. In The Lede, Trillin gathers over a half century of his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and the media world that is their orbit. A small roadside restaurant is thrown into upheaval after being named the best barbecue in Texas by Texas Monthly. Trillin and New Yorker editor Wallace Shawn have a showdown about "obscene language." A local weekly newspaper in Savannah gets unexpectedly embroiled in a missing person case. The line between journalism and protestor erodes at a reunion of Freedom Riders. Plus pieces on outrageous film reviews, the carefully manufactured elitism of Vanity Fair, the early days of food website Chowhound, controversial baron and publisher Conrad Black, and the Fortune 500 (what would it be like to be 501st?)"--

A reissue of Calvin Trillin's memoir of his relationship with a brilliant but tragic Yale classmate that is also a rumination on social change in the 1950s and 1960sRemembering Denny is perhaps Calvin Trillin's most inspired and powerful book: a memoir of a friendship, a work of investigative reporting, and an exploration of a country and a time that captures something essential about how America has changed since Trillin--and Denny Hansen--were graduated from Yale in 1957. Roger "Denny" Hansen had seemed then a college hero for the ages: a charmer with a dazzling smile, the subject of a feature in Life magazine, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a varsity swimmer, a Rhodes scholar...perhaps a future president, as his friends only half-joked. But after early jobs in government and journalism, Hansen's life increasingly took a downward turn and he gradually lost touch with family and old friends before eventually committing suicide--an obscure, embittered, pain-racked professor--in 1991. In contemplating his friend's life, Calvin Trillin considers questions both large and small--what part does the pressure of high expectations place on even the most gifted, how difficult might it have been to be a closeted homosexual in the unyielding world of the 1960s Foreign Service, how much responsibility does the individual bear for all that happens in his life--in a book that is also a meditation on our country's evolving sense of itself.

Murray Tepper would say that he is an ordinary New Yorker who is simply trying to read the newspaper in peace. But he reads while sitting behind the wheel of his parked car, and his car always seems to be in a particularly desirable parking spot. Not surprisingly, he is regularly interrupted by drivers who want to know if he is going out.Tepper isn't going out. Why not? His explanations tend to be rather literal—the indisputable fact, for instance, that he has twenty minutes left on the meter.But once New Yorkers become aware of Tepper, some of them begin to suspect that he knows something they don't. And an ever-increasing number of them are willing to line up for the opportunity to sit in his car with him and find out what it is.Tepper Isn't Going Out is a wise and witty story of an ordinary man who, perhaps innocently, changes the world around him.

This delightful book collects Calvin Trillin's accounts of his trips to Europe with his wife, Alice, and their two daughters. In Taormina, Sicily, they cheerfully disagree with Mrs. Tweedie's 1904 assertion that the beautiful town "is being spoilt," and skip the Grand Tour in favor of swimming holes, table soccer, and taureaux piscine. In Paris, they spend a day on the Champs-Elysées comparing Freetime's "le Hitburger" to McDonald's Big Mac. In Spain, Trillin wonders whether he will run out of Spanish "the way someone might run out of flour or eggs." Filled with Trillin's characteristic humor, Travels with Alice is the perfect book for summer travelers.

Calvin Trillin begins his wise and charming ruminations on family by stating the sum total of his child-rearing advice: "Try to get one that doesn't spit up. Otherwise, you're on your own." Suspicious of any child-rearing theories beyond "Your children are either the center of your life or they're not," Trillin has clearly reveled in the role of family man. Acknowledging the special perils to the privacy of people living with a writer who occasionally remarks, "I hope you're not under the impression that what you just said was off the record," Trillin deals with the subject of family in a way that is loving, honest, and wildly funny in Family Man.

Calvin Trillin, the celebrated New Yorker writer, offers a rich and engaging biography of his father, as well as a literate and entertaining fanfare for the common (and decent, and hard-working) man.Abe Trillin had the western Missouri accent of someone who had grown up in St. Joseph and the dreams of America of someone who had been born is Russia. In Kansas City, he was a grocer, at least until he swore off the grocery business. He was given to swearing off things-coffee, tobacco, alcohol, all neckties that were not yellow in color. Presumably he had also sworn off swearing, although he was a collector of curses, such as "May you have an injury that is not covered by workman's compensation." Although he had a strong vision of the sort of person he wanted his son to be, his explicit advice about how to behave didn't go beyond an almost lackadaisical "You might as well be a mensch." Somehow, though, Abe Trillin's messages got through clearly.The author's unerring sense of the American character is everywhere apparent in this quietly powerful memoir, Messages from My Father.

In the 1970s, Calvin Trillin informed America that its most glorious food was not to be found at the pretentious restaurants he referred to generically as La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine. With three hilarious books over the next two decades-American Fried; Alice, Let's Eat; and Third Helpings-he established himself as, in Craig Claiborne's phrase, "the Walt Whitman of American eats." Trillin's three comic masterpieces are now available in what Trillin calls The Tummy Trilogy.

In January 1961, following eighteen months of litigation that culminated in a federal court order, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to enter the University of Georgia. Calvin Trillin, then a reporter for Time Magazine, attended the court fight that led to the admission of Holmes and Hunter and covered their first week at the university-a week that began in relative calm, moved on to a riot and the suspension of the two students "e;for their own safety,"e; and ended with both returning to the campus under a new court order.Shortly before their graduation in 1963, Trillin came back to Georgia to determine what their college lives had been like. He interviewed not only Holmes and Hunter but also their families, friends, and fellow students, professors, and university administrators. The result was this book-a sharply detailed portrait of how these two young people faced coldness, hostility, and occasional understanding on a southern campus in the midst of a great social change.

Articles and comic verse about the Lone Star State from the Thurber Prize winner: ';What's not to love?' Texas Monthly Whether reporting for the New Yorker, penning comic verse and political commentary, or writing his memoirs, Calvin Trillin has bumped into Texas again and again. He insists it's not by design';there has simply been a lot going on in Texas.' Astute readers will note, however, that Trillin's family immigrated to America through the port of Galveston, and, after reading this book, many will believe the Lone Star State has somehow imprinted itself on his imagination. Trillin on Texas gathers some of his best writing on subjects near to his heartpolitics, true crime, food, and rare books among themthat also have a Texas connection. Indulging his penchant for making ';snide and underhanded jokes about respectable public officials,' he offers his signature sardonic take on the Bush dynasty and their tendency toward fractured syntax; a faux but quite believable LBJ speech; and wry portraits of assorted Texas county judges, small town sheriffs, and Houston immigration lawyers. He takes us on a pilgrimage to the barbecue joint that Texas Monthly named the best in Texas, and describes scouting for books with Larry McMurtry. He tells the stories of two teenagers who dug up half a million dollars in an ice chest, and of rare book dealer Johnny Jenkins, who was found floating in the Colorado River with a bullet wound in the back of his head. And he recounts how redneck movie reviewer ';Joe Bob Briggs' fueled a war between Dallas's daily newspapers and pays tribute to two courageous Texas women who spoke truth to power: Molly Ivins and Sissy Farenthold. Sure to entertain both Texans and non-Texans, Trillin on Texas proves again that Trillin is one of America's shrewdest and wittiest observers.