Charles McCabe Reader

From front jacket: "Charles McCabe, the late columnist for the 'San Francisco Chronicle,' was one of the great originals of American journalism. Even those readers who disagreed with his always provocative opinions were nonetheless fascinated by the audacity of his theses or with his remarkable command of the language. At a wake for McCabe in the basement of his favorite North Beach saloon, a sorrowing publican summed up McCabe's literary achievement by declaring, 'The son of a bitch could write about anything.' What the good publican meant was that McCabe could make most anything he wrote about interesting. In this..anthology, 'The Charles McCabe Reader,' the remarkable McCabe addresses a diversity of subjects including his mother, growing up, his early days in journalism, women, love, marriage, famous personalities, and a miscellany of profundities. McCabe's long-time editor, Gordon Pates, has assembled this collection, which Pates characterizes as 'really the best [certainly the most enduring] of McCabe's work,' from the last 12 years of McCabe's published columns.

I bought this book for a friend and ended up reading it myself. If you want a person's real opinions , with the fog that is cast over today, read this book. You may or may not agree with him, his subjects may be even inane at times, but it is an honest to god opinion without fear of a lawsuit or rioting or being banished to the "boorish and unenlightened "side of this mess we call society.

From the kid in New York begging cigarette coupons to get his first ball glove, and his mother's comments that marked him for life, to his opinions on modern life without the normal Politically Correct filter, Charles McCabe wrote passionate columns daily for the San Francisco Chronicle. This is an almost autobiographical selection of some of the best. Classical quotes, current events, or even a pack of razor blades would send him on a rant in which you learned the opinons of philosophers, newspaper writers, and his cronies. I always dreamed there was a parallel world where I could be sitting two stools down at the Washbag. Maybe I would even like drinking scotch if it meant you could hear this kind of running dialog about the deepest and shallowest subjects first hand. In the mean time, this will have to do.