Title

Wry martinis

Description

Buckley's frequent New Yorker contributions to the back-page "Shouts and Murmurs" column have been a regular source of hilarity: The Pope's appearance on Oprah to promote his book; letters of recommendation for O. J. Simpson's New York condo application; a review of Peter Benchley's new book, Gills, about a vengeful Dolly Varden trout; the starship Enterprise's most daring and difficult assignment - programming its VCR; and several dozen other delightful New Yorker parodies, satires, and pastiches are all collected here. Buckley has occasionally been the source of controversy, as when he perpetrated a highly efficient and successful hoax claiming that the Kremlin was about to auction off the embalmed remains of Lenin in order to raise hard currency. A review he wrote of one of Tom Clancy's novels so infuriated the novelist that he launched fax cruise missiles at Buckley - providing Buckley with ammunition for his counterstrike. When not annoying the Russian Interior Ministry or megaselling thriller writers, Buckley embarks on unusual adventures of his own: steaming up the Amazon in the company of billionaires and deposed European royalty, spelunking in Mayan caves, landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Nimitz, and hurtling about the wild blue yonder with the Thunderbirds (see "How I Went Nine Gs in an F-16 and Only Threw Up Five Times").

Identifier

619340

679452338

Creator

Buckley, Christopher

Format

1st ed.

Source

Brian Lamb Booknotes Collection

Gift of Brian Lamb, 2011.

Catalog record

Language

eng

Date

1997

Program air date: May 4, 1997.

Publisher

Random House

George Mason University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives

Text

Transcription of Annotations
Notes on front endpapers: What is forty like. FYI My first tryst. Agnostic. Tattoo. Love for sin lobbyists. Vietnam--guilt/malaise p. 236. Headaches p. 267. Christopher Hitchens 'my British chum.' 'Washington Winter" p. 289. Lenin p. 127. Running for Pres. p. 50. Thunderbirds p. 146. Yale. Norwegian Tramp freighter (18 yrs old). Esquire. V.P. Bush speech writer. Maine (near Bangor). [Lamb includes his tally of publications where the articles in this collection were first published.] Agnostic. Ann Landers p. 209. Tattoo p. 159. Aircraft carrier Nimitz/Tom Clancy. Amazon Trip. Lamb checks each title on the contents page and adds Mrs. Prescott Bush and Ann Landers to their respective articles. Underlinings/Notes: Underlinings: career, humor, religion, life. Notes: "Lenin," "with Lucy," "dog Duck," "Clay Felker," "Mags," "Forbes FYI five years," "children," "I think so," "Tom Clancy 1994," "Haiti," "9Gs," "18 deaths since 1958," "Trudeau," "Tattoo," "Juan Carlos and the tattoo," "Birds," "Malcolm," "ten years 1997," "hotel rooms," "looted Crillon of monograms," "40% to Kai Erikson," "16 million men, 80% did not go, 6% saw combat," "Guilt," "air conditioning in my house," "Bush speech writer, novel," "face time," "Christopher Hitchins." With inscription on title page, "For Brian, Friend of Authors! Thanks, Christopher B."

Subject

"American wit and humor."

Relation

Original Booknotes interview

Rights

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