Leaving Home - Softcover

Buchwald, Art

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449909727 ISBN 13: 9780449909720

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1995

Synopsis

The New York Times Bestseller.
"Dear readers: have I got a treat for you! Art Buchwald has written a book about his life . . . I guarantee 254 pages of pure pleasure." -- Ann Landers
"Strikingly honest . . . [Buchwald] grew up in orphanages and foster homes and never knew his mother who, shortly after he was born, entered a mental hospital and spent the rest of her life
there . . . . But instead of becoming a sociopath, Buchwald became a professional funnyman and a national figure whose columns skewer pretense and politicians . . . . Score one for humor as a means of survival." -- The Washington Post Book World
"

About this title

From AudioFile:

Funny people don't always have funny childhoods. Leaving Home is Buchwald's tale of a painful childhood, which took him from various shelters to a series of foster homes to New York's Hebrew Orphan Asylum --all before age fifteen. His story is compelling, and he tells it in his own indescribable way. Buchwald relates the story as if conversing over a cup of coffee. There's no attempt at vocal characterization because the characters are richly described through the text. You'll come away wishing for the unabridged version because Buchwald's story is so compelling. M.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews:

Humorist Buchwald turns serious, albeit not wholly so, in this affecting memoir of his painful youth and early manhood. Shortly after she bore him in 1925, Buchwald's emigrant mother was committed to a psychiatric institution, where she was to spend the rest of her life. The author's father, an impoverished draper, couldn't afford to make a home for young Art and his three older sisters, so the children shuttled about N.Y.C.'s foster-care system for most of the Depression. Finally, in 1939, Buchwald pŠre was able to reunite the family in a Queens apartment. In the meantime, however, his son had developed a fiddlefoot, the soul of a hustler, and a rich fantasy life. WW II gave him a chance to leave a hurtful past behind, and he took it, lying about his age to enlist in the Marines. After returning unscathed from the Pacific (where he served as an ordnance specialist in a fighter squadron), Sgt. Buchwald took his discharge and used the GI Bill to enroll at USC. Despite discovering that he lacked a high-school diploma, the university allowed him to attend classes as a special student. But after three fulfilling years there, Buchwald learned that his government stipend could be used to study in Paris. He transferred almost immediately and found the City of Light much to his liking. In relatively short order, he gained employment as a Variety stringer and convinced a Herald Tribune editor to let him write a column for $25 a week. At the close of this memoir, he's typing ``Paris After Dark'' by Art Buchwald.... An often brutally frank account in which Buchwald reveals an affecting capacity for reflection without lapsing into pathos or losing the light touch that's gained him fame and fortune. The rest of the story can't come soon enough. (First serial to Parade) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0449909727
• ISBN 13: 9780449909720
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 254