![]() It was published in the mid-1990s, and we were both disappointed that it didn't get more attention. ![]() It is as close to a memoir as he'll ever write. So is Andy's companion of recent years, Beryl Pfizer, whose career in television included a stint in the 1950s on NBC's Today show.Īmong his books, My War, an account of experiences as a Stars and Stripes reporter in World War II, is probably his favorite. She was perfect: beautiful, practical, and droll. For 62 years, until she died in 2004, Andy was married to Marge. His first great grandchildren, also twins, were born this year. Aside from Brian, Andy has three daughters-Ellen and the twins, Emily and Martha. And yet, amazingly, outside the limelight, Andy's life has been very private, devoted to his family, some very close friends (his best friend was Walter Cronkite), and a few older colleagues. The majority of them contain his opinions and impressions about the world around him. I learned that a writer lives by his words."Īndy has written hundreds of thousands of words in his television essays and syndicated columns. that (my father) has stood for something all his life when so many people have not, and that while he became rich and famous, it could just as easily have gone the other way and he would not have done anything differently. We asked Brian Rooney, Andy's son, who is an ABC correspondent, to write the introduction: "If your parents live long enough," he wrote, "you get to know them more as people than parents. full of intimate observation of how people speak, feel and behave." The selections for the new collection were made by Susan Bieber, Andy's gifted producer at 60 Minutes (really, his trusted aide-de-everything), and Morgen Van Vorst, a PublicAffairs editor. In a review in the New Yorker, Edmund Wilson, among the most respected literary critics of the era, said of Air Gunner: "The first piece of writing so far which has really given me any idea of what it is like to operate a bomber. ![]() It is a compilation of writing done since his first book, Air Gunner (co-authored with Bud Hutton), was published in 1946. His latest book is called Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit. He has published sixteen books, and for the past two decades, I have been his publisher. But celebrity is not Andy's own measure of his professional worth writing is. Walk (actually shamble) through an airport with him, and everyone who is not a foreigner offers a smile, a nod, or a friendly comment. These pieces are the main reason Rooney is so famous. For 31 of those years he has delivered the closing essay on CBS's 60 Minutes. (Nov.Andy Rooney turns 91 on January 14, 2010. Of course, it's easy to overlook that when he's lobbing politically incorrect grenades-about door-to-door census takers in Afghanistan, he writes, "Some of them dont even have doors"-, while the late Kurt Cobain is dismissed thusly: if he "applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his drug-infested life, its reasonable to think that his music may not have made much sense either." That's mean-spirited, maybe but even at his most outrageous, there's usually a grain of truth in Rooney's taut and well-constructed musings. ![]() What will surprise readers is how thoughtful and well-constructed his opinions are, and that he is capable of sentimentality and bewilderment, and has a big and generous heart. Perhaps because Rooney's appearances at the tail end of 60 MinutesĪre so brief and often caustic, it's tempting to dismiss him as a small-minded whiner who gets paid big bucks to rant about whatever has just crossed his mind. Anyone who's ever rolled their eyes at the absurdities of modern society will find a soul mate in the legendary curmudgeon, whose on-camera commentaries translate surprisingly well to the printed page (if you can get past his personalized punctuation, which he takes pains to explain in the foreword, but which will likely irritate grammatical purists). Rooney fans aren't the only readers who will appreciate this massive collection of missives.
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