Some Times in America - Softcover

Chancellor, Alexander

3.67

6 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 033039374X ISBN 13: 9780330393744

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 2000

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America may no longer have a special relationship with Britain, but it still has one with Alexander Chancellor. Nurtured during the war on American food parcels and American musicals, he grew up in England believing the United States to be some kind of paradise. But it was many years before he had a chance to verify this assumption. Certainly nobody could have predicted in 1944, when he was four years old and his father introduced him to American culture by bringing back records of Oklahoma! from New York, that almost fifty years later he would take up the famous monocle of Eustace Tilley, mascot of the New Yorker, and edit its 'The Talk of the Town' section.His appointment was asking for trouble, but also reaped a harvest of news, gossip, humour and embarassment that make for irresistibly good reading. Through unforgettable anecdotage and analysis readers can join one of our most engaging journalists in his singular sojourns on the far side.

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About the Author:

Alexander Chancellor is a freelance journalist who writes a weekly column in the Guardian. He was formerly editor of the Spectator and the Independent Magazine as well as a deputy editor at the New Yorker.

From Publishers Weekly:

Chancellor, a veteran British editor and journalist (he has been editor of the Spectator, among other publications), has done several stints in the U.S., most recently in 1992-1993 as editor of the New Yorker's Talk of the Town section under Tina Brown. This lighthearted and rather lightweight account revolves not only around the magazine but around Chancellor's social gallivanting and his glosses on American life, clearly targeted toward a British audience-for instance, "The point of most religion in the United States is that, like liquor, it should make you feel good." (And Mr. Chancellor has enjoyed his liquor: one of his adventures involved getting arrested on a DUI charge while covering the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta. America, he says, has "ridiculously low speed limits.") We learn how he sublet a lovely furnished flat from the writer Gregor von Rezzori, how he lunched at the prestigious Century Club, how he attended dinner parties given by the very rich Mrs. Jayne Wrightsman and, in a more unpleasant New York experience, how he got mugged. He also tells of how he rented a picturesque cottage in the Hudson Valley during the summer and invited his pal Michael Kinsley and others up for barbecues. Of working with Tina Brown, we learn that, during the early part of her editorship of the New Yorker, she lived in fear of press judgments after the extremely negative reaction to her appointment as editor: "Despite [owner] Si Newhouse's obvious admiration for her, she never behaved as if she felt secure in her job." In brief, this is a collection of anecdotes that is very New Yorker-ish--charming, urbane, witty--but slight. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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