Leaving Home
Buchwald, Art
old entrenchments with concrete, actively discouraging land preservation, and "privatizing" the area into a theme park. The book's most disgusting revelation is its claim that then-Congressman Ben...
...Here's one passage lifted at random from a single page: I printed one copy [of a family newspaper] and passed it around at family gatherings, waiting for laughter and compliments...
...limo...
...The book's most disgusting revelation is its claim that then-Congressman Ben Campbell helped the homicidal psychopath Russell Means plan the 1988 defilement of the mass grave on Custer Hill...
...Their children and grandchildren, in turn, repay their steadfastness by queuing up for Phil and Sally Jessy and Oprah herself, where with tears and bitterness they complain about how thankless it has been to inherit the most prosperous and pleasant country in history...
...He recalls that he often entertained his children and dinner-party guests with stories of his days as a Marine in World War II...
...The generation that saved the world is now going to bore it to death...
...He writes his pieces with preternatural speed, as anyone who's read them can see...
...But Leaving Home begs cornparison with the childhood memoir of his fellow columnist Russell Baker, whose Growing Up was wittier and wiser and far more evocative of the same World War II generation...
...The lesson armored him well throughout his adolescence, as he straggled from one odd job to another...
...Unlike the loutish Campbell, he was no sham warrior, but the real article, who had served in three wars and bore his decorations for valor proudly...
...Perhaps Campbell really is the sort of fool who considers the death of a 67-year-old man with a bad heart an "omen...
...F--- you...
...About three-quarters of the way through the book, Buchwald gives a hint of his motivation...
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...But in writing that the tragedy removed an "obstacle" to the name-stripping, Viola inadvertently suggests what we already knew: the only way his jumped-up "warrior" can get the better of a Custer is if the Custer is already dead...
...Otherwise long stretches of the book consist solely of disconnected thoughts—what a less kindly reviewer would call non sequiturs...
...Buchwald's taciturn father struggled unsuccessfully to support his family, and was forced to leave young Arthur and his three sisters in the care of a series of foster homes...
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...Leaving Home is the work of a fellow who has been writing for newspapers for a very long time: the sentences are short, the paragraphs are short, and they follow one another with no evident regard for narrative flow...
...There is, I guess, some justice in this...
...heat off Cristobal Colon, a descendent of the archfiend Columbus, Campbell appeared on horseback as a nineteenth-century Cheyenne war-chief, insisting on riding ahead of Colon's A rt Buchwald, the famous humorist, is an exemplar of the pre-Oprah generation, the cohort of men who came of age in the late 1930s, saved the world during the 1940s, and thereafter set about creating the most prosperous and pleasant country in history...
...they did their duty manfully (to use an unOprah word) and found virtue in reticence, self-restraint, discipline, and hard work, having as much fun as they could Andrew Ferguson is a senior writer for the Washingtonian...
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...It seems to have been offered not for illumination but as punishment...
...F ortunately Campbell is not always ghoulish...
...From unpromising origins he has become inordinately successful—famous and highly paid, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters...
...Yet when chosen co-marshal of the 1992 Tournament of Roses Parade to take the P.C...
...They are topical, very brief, and almost indistinguishable one day to the next...
...This is a curious admission for a memoirist to make, especially after hp has just uncorked more than seventy-five pages of the very same Marine stories that stupefy his dinner companions...
...Yet would it really be amiss to suggest that a U.S...
...saver modules...
...The humorist has written a memoir, currently a best-seller, that is much longer than its 250 pages would suggest...
...usually he is merely a boorish publicity hound...
...Things haven't changed much...
...171 along the way...
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...As though forgetting what he has just written, Viola stupidly claims that Campbell could "sympathize" with the Custer family—just one line after quoting him to the effect that the fatal heart attack of the general's great-grandnephew, Colonel George A. Custer III, was a good omen...
...Its great virtue, given the author's difficulties as a young man, is its lack of self-pity, so rare in the Oprah age...
...The rest is history, or so Buchwald must presume, for there the book ends...
...Aunt Ruth, Aunt Pauline, and Aunt Augusta were all related...
...Rumination piled upon anecdote piled upon reminiscence piled upon more rumination, it has a strangely unvarying tone, a long low rumble that never intensifies, never slackens...
...My socks were constantly falling down and my shirttail was always sticking out...
...Still, when a bystander, obviously thinking of the horse's introduction to the New World, raised the reasonable question, "Why aren't you walking like your ancestors did...
...I discovered over the years that the only one who will listen to your stories is another Marine...
...A few of those are even amusing, in a mild, wry sort of way...
...Editors love him for these reasons and one still more important, which is that his work is as likely to offend newspaper readers as "Hints from Heloise...
...Throughout my childhood, everyone in charge of me asked the same question, "Did you brush your teeth...
...See my "Russell Means on Custer Hill," TAS, December 1988...
...After VJ day, he enrolled in USC...
...soldiers in an American military cemetery—solely to gratify his sick Ethnic lust for revenge on a century-dead foe—deserves to rot in jail...
...But you're entitled to wonder: If his own friends can't stay awake through his interminable recollections, what conceivable reason could he have for thinking the book-buying public would...
...T he son of European immigrants who made their way to New York City, Art Buchwald }fad an unpleasant childhood...
...The reader, however, will still be in the dark as to why, precisely, Buchwald has written a memoir at all...
...Leaving Home probably takes longer to read than it took its author to write...
...W riting a memoir, says Buchwald, "is probably the most egotistical project a person can undertake...
...In opposing the name-stripping, he sought not to glorify the three slain Custer brothers at the expense of Indian combatants, but to defend his family's name and honor—a concept apparently too esoteric for either the ghoul Campbell or his Boswell...
...They were not given to complaint...
...People tell me that I was a sloppy dresser...
...Then, in a spirit of adventure, he took off for Paris on the GI Bill...
...If there is a moral to the maundering—and I'm just taking a stab at it here—it might be summarized in the lesson Buchwald took from his unstable upbringing, and which he repeats throughout the book: "If I was to survive, I would have to fend for myself rather than wait for help from others...
...Then I noticed their eyes glazed over," he writes...
...I'm still doing the same thing—showing my writing to others and waiting for a reaction...
...He lied to the Marines about his age and spent the war as an ordnance man on a Pacific atoll, where he garnered the experiences that would drop heads into soup tureens for the rest of his dinner-going life...
...From Buchwald's deadpan retelling it's hard to know which was which...
...He tells his life story chronologically, which is reasonable enough, and fortunate, too, for chronology affords Leaving Home its only structure...
...The question dogs his memoir from first page to last...
...On LEAVING HOME: A MEMOIR Art Buchwald G.P...
...Some of these people were nice to the boy...
...It doesn't take much of this before a reader grows frustrated, not to say bitchy, and begins to talk back: "And...
...They accepted me as part of the family...
...He is, in short, a world-champion coaster, and, as with all coasters of long standing, his self-regard has at last overtaken his capacity for discrimination...
...the noble red man wittily replied...
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...And...
...I knew the late Colonel Custer...
...Now, for the Buchwald generation, it's pay-back time...
...I never felt treated as an outsider...
...Putnam's Sons /253 pages / $22.95 reviewed by ANDREW FERGUSON 76 The American Spectator April/May 1994 the page, some of the stories are well told—he's had lots of practice, after all...
...Shortly after his birth his mother succumbed to mental illness...
...She was put away for the rest of her life and her son never met her...
...On the day of his death he had helped dedicate a Michigan monument to his fellow Vietnam veterans—"losers" all, given Campbell's criteria...
...The American Spectator April /May 1994 77...
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...After Pearl Harbor, he left home for good...
...Some weren't...
...It is obvious that, if only to prevent future waves of Greek hoplites, Vikings, and Roman legionaries, politicians should be prohibited from appearing in paradeswhile in ethnic warrior costume...
...He finagled his way onto the Paris Herald-Tribune as a gossip columnist...
...the congressman did have an answer...
...Drawing again on his Moral Idiocy vein, Viola terms this atrocity "long overdue," mocking its opponents...
...As a newspaper humorist he ran out of gas about twenty years ago, yet his columns continue to appear in hundreds of provincial papers...
...congressman who secretly conspires to desecrate the grave of almost two hundred U.S...
Vol. 27 • April 1994 • No. 45
