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David Brinkley Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion
NY Knopf 1996 0679450718 / 9780679450719 First Edition Hardcover Very Good very good +
0679450718 0679450718 Owner inscription on half title page rom Publishers WeeklyBrinkley brings his bracing wit and journalistic acumen to this selection of his brief closing commentaries delivered over the last 15 years of his Sunday morning ABC-TV news program, This Week with David Brinkley. He skewers Washington's lingo of cover-up and denial, satirizes Clinton's defeated health care plan and blasts Japan for its resistance to imports. His rogues' gallery includes Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Libyan dictator Muammar Khadafy, Haiti's deposed Duvalier clan and North Korea's Kim Jong Il. Many of these 180 mini-essays, each a page in length or less, topple easy targets, such as lax airline safety standards or self-aggrandizing government bureaucracies. Other pieces comment amusingly on the annoyances of modern life or on the odd or the bizarre?e.g., castles for sale in East Germany, longhorn cattle bolting from a California rodeo to push into a bank's front door. Although Brinkley is a formidable foe of cant and hypocrisy, too many of these pieces seem dated or work better on the tube than on the printed page. 250,000 first printing; available in large print and on audio cassette.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalSince 1981, Brinkley has hosted the ABC Sunday morning program of news commentary and interviews, This Week with David Brinkley, and as a rule he has finished off each show with a personal comment on the passing scene. This is a collection of 180 such "homilies," each no more than a paragraph or two. Brinkley's ability to find things to comment on is hardly less remarkable than his facility in treating them. Gentle, courteous, and restrained though his manner may be, his comments contain a neat rapier-thrust of amiable malice; and in the course of the book many pieces of armor are pierced. The selections range widely, and although their prevailing theme is politics, almost anything?Jim Bakker, Princess Di, copper pennies, the IRS?will set him off, and away his fancy flutters on its brief, airy little excursion. The book will pleasantly beguile a tedious half hour and is recommended for popular collections.-?A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., BostonCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.The New York Times Book Review, Douglas A. SylvaNo matter how pessimistic he becomes ... Mr. Brinkley is never uncivil. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.From BooklistViewers of This Week with David Brinkley will recognize the 180 short pieces that make up this collection as being the closing comments broadcast at the end of the Sunday morning news program. Delivered in Brinkley's distinctive clipped tones, they capture an urbane newsman's sense of the absurd in politics and in daily life. Remarkably, these homilies, as Brinkley calls them, hold up pretty well. For example, the idea of the Pentagon spending $1,118 for one of those little plastic feet that stick on the ends of metal chairs is no less ridiculous today than it was 12 years ago when Brinkley spoke about it (of course, the price has no doubt gone up since 1984). In general, government bungling is Brinkley's favorite topic, and as a Washington insider, he has no shortage of material. Take the case of Stanley Newberg, a thankful immigrant who left $5.6 million to the federal government. Unfortunately, as Brinkley notes, the government spends $4.1 billion a day, meaning that Newberg's generous gift disappeared in less than two minutes. This is an ephemeral little collection, of no great lasting value, but it's good fun; Brinkley is much loved; and there's going to be a 250,000-copy first printing. Order accordingly. Ilene CooperFrom Kirkus ReviewsThese unambitious sign-offs (styled ``homilies'') from 15 years of This Week with David Brinkley never pretend to much--and they surely don't presume to anything as weighty as a raison d'?tre. Which makes for a graceful exercise but not for a discernible imperative, even for the author's following. The venerable Brinkley, who gave us his more substantive (if still characteristically anecdotal) Memoirs last year, takes on the usual Establishment targets, but his potshots are throwaways--180 pieces in 192 scant pages. In the aggregate, they constitute time- capsule commentary on the culture of the past decade and a half, however slight: The fastest-growing job in government (as of April 23, 1988) was that of prison guard; the IRS will be set up within one month after nuclear attack to collect taxes (this per some government memo); daylight saving time was moved up to the first Sunday in April due to lobbying by the Barbecue Industry Association. Brinkley ranges well beyond the Washington bureaucracy, sometimes pithily (``The Constitution calls for electing a president every four years, but it does not say we have to spend the whole four years doing it''), more often lamely (on why the Arabs need Israel: ``What would they find to do with themselves? What would . . . Arafat do for excitement?''). While Brinkley's authoritative weariness informs every one of the program-closing snippets, his stubbornly clipped sentences fail to resonate on the page as they do on the air. Clearly, his gift is lodged in the delivery--at least when it comes to afterthoughts. (First printing of 250,000) -
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