As you know, gentle reader, I like Bob Greene’s books well enough to spell his name correctly most of the time. This is the first I’ve read in two plus years (since Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War in March 2005 and Bob Greene’s America in May 2004).
It collects a number of his columns from Esquire and the Chicago Tribune again, so he’s back in his sweet spot of short narrative nonfiction with the occasional forays into "People and Things That Happened Because I Am A Columnist" or "Things I Made Happen Because I Know Michael Jordan" filler material. Of course, we cringe when he talks about calling a seventeen year old girl in 1988 and talking to her about her sexual arousal watching Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy and wonder is that the one?
Greene trends more mawkish than Andy Rooney, so he falls beneath the old curmudgeon in my estimation, but he did make a career at it whereas I’m only making a blog of writing my insights. So I respect the man and enjoy his work enough to pick up a collection of columns from time to time, but I’m not exactly plunging into the first edition copy of All Summer Long, one of two first edition copies that have passed through my hands and have remained on my to-read shelf.
