[Russell Baker] writes serious funny things usually with the purpose of pointing out absurdities, including economists' prevarications, the pretensions of technology, and government prose that has not noticeably improved during the Reagan monarchy. Whatever the targets of his attacks, Russell Baker is a defender of the greatest heritage of this nation—of which conservatives ought to be more respectful than they often are—the American English language. Within the New York Times Russell Baker compares as a grammarian to the house conservative William Safire somewhat as Red Smith compares to Howard Cosell. But Baker is more than a grammarian. He is a master of the American language.
[Growing Up] is a revelation of that fact. In it he recounts the first 24 years of his life as the son of an independent and deep-rooted Virginian family, people as frugal and brave as their American ancestors two hundred years before had been. One paragraph of his description of family life in the Depression is worth everything Studs Terkel ever wrote. The Depression brought families close together…. [Baker's] was an unusual family. His childhood was not an unhappy one. I have always thought that Tolstoy's famous first sentence of Anna Karenina—"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"—was a lot of guff, and that its very opposite is true. (p. 331)
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