Curious world: A New Yorker at large

Philip Hamburger was a staff writer of The New Yorker magazine for 58 years starting in 1939. He's served under all four of its editors and has written for nearly every section of the magazine from Talk of the Town to Shouts and Murmurs. He's been a wartime overseas correspondent and a reviewer of music and television, and written the famous 55-part series on mid-sized American cities titled "Notes for a Gazetteer" as well as innumerable profiles and interviews. His book Curious World is a collection of Hamburger's favorite of these profiles written between 1946 to 1986. Hamburger is a true master of the profile. He takes the form from it's humble beginnings as introduction material (so-and-so was born at such and-such a time...is currently...has won these prizes...) to a literary type of interview that reads like fiction. Breaking traditional reporting style, Hamburger includes himself as a main character in all of these essays giving the reader the use of his eyes and ears as well as filtering `facts' through his own `rose-colored glasses'. Not only does a reader hear what the interviewed have to say, but experiences the world as this reporter does. Luckily for the reader, Hamburger's world is a charming one full of heros and humor. Is it news? Is it truth? What can be said except that the world only exists as it is experienced by individuals. Who better to experience it for us than Philip Hamburger? Hamburger begins many of his profiles with descriptions of the people he is about to report on. These descriptions range from the purely aesthetic to memories that offer insight into the person's character. Despite the fact that such descriptions are normally considered mundane and "too much information", from Hamburger, these snippets are all important, attention-grabbing devices that immediately intrigue the reader as well as changing the `subject' from an object of inspection to a leading character in a novel. Here are his first three sentences of an essay about a drawing teacher:Robert Beverly Hale is a beloved teacher. He is a tall, spare, somewhat rumpled patrician of seventy-six, with black rimmed glasses and an El Greco face. He teaches two courses, Artistic Anatomy and Elements of Drawing, at the Art Students League, on West Fifty-seventh Street, and his classes are a continual, and almost legendary, celebration not only of the beauty and wonder of the human form but of Hale himself. From these introductions, Hamburger generally moves on to describe the circumstances under which he has met the engaging subject. He always refers to himself in his essays as "we" which, in it's quaint, formal way, invites the reader into his secret world as he tells his story like he's relating a memory he and his reader share. Hamburger tells the reader where he is; "we ran into him the other day at the Guggenheim, where some three hundred of his works cover every curve of the museum, hang from the ceiling (Dubuffet clouds float somewhat disturbingly in a