THE WHITES AT WORK
Russell, Isabel
The Whites at Work KATHARINE AND E.B. WHITE: An Affectionate Memoir by Isabel Russell W.W. Norton. 269 pp. $18.95. Isabel Russell was personal secretary to Katharine and E.B. White from 1970 to...
...This breezy, often funny book is a warm tribute to two unusually skilled practitioners of their craft...
...They were reconciled, but it was only years later, after Russell had seen her own husband suffer a serious stroke, that she came to understand how illness and age can debilitate a human being...
...Even as Katharine White's health suffered major ravages, the fiction editor of The New Yorker never lost her devotion to the magazine and maintained an extensive correspondence...
...Finally, after an emotional altercation, Russell quit...
...She wisely selects entertaining and telling reminiscences, and for the most part she manages to avoid the merely trivial...
...Russell admired her and learned from her but chafed from her demands and failing memory...
...White from 1970 to 1978 at their Maine farm, and she seems to have total recall of their mornings of working together...
...While both Whites were apolitical, they were devoted to civil liberties and human rights...
Vol. 53 • January 1989 • No. 1
