Not disposed to educate or alienate her audience, Ms. Ephron can't believe that beautiful women or women with breasts have anything to complain about…. This implies, of course, that only plain women earn the right to question a sexist society—presumably because they are less readily accepted by it. Ephron's audience can, no doubt, speak with some authority here. Unfortunately, Ms. Ephron herself never asks why beauty is such an important commodity in this society and fails to rec...

While she might be a bit startled to hear it, I think that Nora Ephron comes pretty close to exemplifying the androgynous ideal that some feminists advocate as the solution to the war between men and women. She is attractively feminine, in the obsolete sense of that battered word, and a regular fellow at the same time. I would even say "one of the boys," if I were not afraid of being misunderstood. She is tender and tough, sentimental and cynical, old-fashioned and modern in just about the rig...

[Scribble Scribble] is as clean, tart and refreshing as the first gin-and-tonic of the summer…. Nora Ephron writes, at all times, with clarity, directness and wit; and with a casual, agreeable chattiness well suited to her subject. It is as if she were calling on the phone at 10 A.M. to bounce a few impressions off you over coffee. Her best moments come when she takes off into manic flight and seems suddenly transformed into Woody Allen; or, perhaps, into a somewhat more malicious Roger Angell…...

At first glance the title, Crazy Salad, recalls Penny Candy, a collection of written-for-magazine essays by Jean Kerr. Even the first essay, "A Few Words about Breasts," salted as it is with self-depreciating remarks, makes me laugh in spite of myself…. With "Breasts" the tendency is to see Nora Ephron as the Seventies' sophisticated sister of Jean Kerr—after all Nora does write for Esquire, not McCalls! Here the comparison ends, for though Nora may write abo...

Ephron has made it as a journalist not only through her wit, which though offhand and irreverent is without the [Dorothy] Parker bite, but through the particular sensibility which infuses her pieces with a freely acknowledged moral bias or ambivalence that nonetheless is seldom allowed to take over the whole show (unless she is describing her own pratfalls, which she does with splendid élan). "Crazy Salad" is a collection of 25 articles "that glance off and onto the subject of wo...

Several times in the course of Wallflower at the Orgy, a collection of magazine articles, Nora Ephron captures the true spirit of the popular arts in America perfectly. It is a spirit that grows from the heart of The People. The media didn't need to invent it, for it reflects profound longings, anxieties, and dreams, the most pernicious neuroses of capitalism; the media merely nourish it…. Ephron is at her best when probing and exposing the masscult sensibility, for she brings to the subject j...

If you've ever heard Nora Ephron hold forth on television, or read her excellent pieces in Esquire and New York magazine—many of which are collected in Crazy Salad—you know her unpredictable and trenchant take on any subject and her unique voice: smart, witty, and confidential. And her voice—written or verbal—is backed by a brilliant, restless mind…. Although Ephron modestly claims that "this book is not intended to be any sort of definitive history of women ...

[Nora Ephron] … gives her subjects plenty of rope before she hangs them. Scribble Scribble …, a gathering of her journalism criticism for Esquire, allows a number of well-known writers and editors to twist slowly in their own wind. Ephron is an excellent parodist. (p. 94) One of Ephron's funniest pieces is not about a journalist but about her cousin, the owner of a Bronx carpet store. He may seem somewhat out of place beside Russell Baker, Bob Haldeman and Theodore H. White, but Cousin ...

Quite early in [And Now Here's Johnny] the author shows her pique at the difficulty of telling the story of the "real" Johnny. The scores of people interviewed agree that he was a nice guy, but none could call themselves either close friends or bitter enemies. Carson, when interviewed, gave short, noncommittal answers. When it comes to keeping his private life private, he's "second only to Greta Garbo"…. Occasionally it gets a little salty, but for the most p...

[Scribble Scribble] is saucier than [Tom Wicker's On Press] and more wide-ranging, but not so thoughtful, no doubt because it is briefer, the chapters sketchier. Another problem is that it's a compilation…. Reading the trim, compact chapters is to have the feeling of killing time in a doctor's office…. Whether she realizes it or not, Nora Ephron is short-changing herself. As one of the top female journalists on manners and modes in modern America, Ephron has much to say, a...

Nora Ephron's "Scribble Scribble" collects 25 shrewd and funny articles on the media written for Esquire. Ephron's best pieces are her devastating profile of Dorothy Schiff, former owner of The New York Post, her scathing review of Brendan Gill's "Here at The New Yorker" and her parodies of Theodore H. White's Making of the President books and Gail Sheehy's "Passages"…. [She] turns out finally to be a troubled critic of pers...

[Crazy Salad is a] collection of witty and absorbing pieces…. At her best, Ephron brings a great deal of herself to her writing … but she is good at thoroughly researched, impersonal reporting as well. Her feminist consciousness is evident throughout, but Ephron is a far too perceptive and original writer to take the usual movement line on every occasion…. She has a gift for finding the different slant on a person or issue so that even pieces on such overworked media favorites as Pat Lo...

If you haven't read Miss Ephron's other two books, "Wallflower at the Orgy" and "Crazy Salad," you should be redistributed by George McGovern. She can write about anything better than anybody else can write about anything…. She pays too much attention [in "Scribble, Scribble"] to The Palm Beach Social Pictorial, Gourmet Social Pictorial, Gourmet magazine, double-crostics and a putative failure of character on the part of Daniel Schorr—the...

Rep-wrecker Nora Ephron swings the funniest journalistic wrecker's ball this side of Rex Reed. [Wallflower at the Orgy] is an implosion of miscellaneous interviews and analyses, nearly all of them highly personal and devastating, focused on some of the established figures in popular culture…. It's an uneven collection of magazine ephemera, but many readers will laugh hilariously while chasing Nora on her rounds. Albert Johnston, "Non-Fiction: 'Wallflower at th...

And Now, Here's Johnny attempts to unveil the "real" Johnny Carson, but Carson mightily resists unveiling. Miss Ephron complains that in interviews he gave short, noncommittal answers…. But the author combed assiduously through old magazine and newspaper files for quotes, anecdotes and information, and pieced together a life story that will doubtless interest all who are dying to know what Johnny Carson is really like. Clarence Petersen, "Paperbacks: 'A...