Dorothy J. (DotJ) - reviewed on 3/7/2009 + 33 more book reviews

From the book back:
The world of Thurber is splendidly sampled in this collection of thirty stories, sketches, and articles that range from the wildest comedy to the serious business of murder. Animal courtship, housemaids, Macbeth, baseball, sailing, husbands and wives, the absurdities and frustrations of madern life -- fall within Thurber's scope. He writes with equal brilliance about an interview with a lemming, travel in prewar France, the Hall-Mills murder case, and an encounter with the Connecticut Moter Vehicle Bureau. And the unique world of Thurber is nowhere better represented than in such short stories as "The Whip-Poor-Will," "You Could Look It Up," and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," included in this collection.


Few writers have recreated daydreams and nightmares as Thurber recreated them. He manages, somehow, to pin them while the nerve filaments are alive and wriggling. These are all brilliant sketches. They have the crisp flavor of things recorded as they happen. An interesting mixture of fancy, fact and philosophy, of the humorous and the macabre."
- - The New York Times Book Review

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