A. J. Liebling

This collection of essays by New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling provides a sampler of Liebling's wide interests and concerns. As a journalist, he developed an affectionate regard for hustlers, handicappers, and confidence men. His essays on New York provide a loving but eccentric portrait of the life of the city. Book reviews, musings on his youth and on great food, comments on the responsibilities of the press, observations on social customs, and, of course, his reports from Europe just before and after World War II all display the keen intelligence and unquenchable curiosity of the writer. A.J. Liebling has often been regarded as one of the greatest of American journalists. These essays show him at his best, always finding the element of human interest in the most complex story. As Fred Warner notes in the introduction, once we read Liebling, we wish he were still around commenting on the absurdities of our times, writing about our current crop of mountebanks who so abundantly flourish, insisting on the objectivity and integrity of the Press. But most of all we wish he were here to grace us with his marvelous prose.

Articles from the fifties recreate the atmosphere of past boxing matches and trace the rise of such great boxers as Rocky Marciano.

"Originally published in 1944, The Road Back to Paris comprises dispatches from France, England, and North Africa that A. J. Liebling filed with The New Yorker during the Second World War. The magazine sent Liebling to Paris in 1939, hoping that he could replicate in wartime France his brilliant reporting of New York life. Liebling succeeded triumphantly, concentrating on writing the individual soldier's story to illuminate the larger picture of the European theater of the war and the fight for what Liebling felt was the first priority of business: the liberation of his beloved France." "Despite his ill health and bad eyesight, Liebling went on patrol, interviewed soldiers, fled Paris and returned after D-Day, was shot at in North Africa and bombed in the blitz in London."--BOOK JACKET.

From an interview with thriller writer Jane Ciabattari on LitHub: "In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, M. Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot—and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, “we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace—no more ’34s and hardly any ’37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.” lovely book about food and wine and Paris in the 1920s by a writer with a New Yorker magazine style.