You can begin quoting Russell Baker in this collection [So This Is Depravity], as you can begin reading him, almost anywhere. Open at random to "The Humble Dollar" (you will have to track it down; his latest book has no table of contents), and you come up with a small gem: "The papers keep saying that the dollar is very weak. This is nonsense. The truth is that the dollar is absolutely powerless. I sent one for a pound of cheese the other day and it was thrown out of the store for givin...

As we all know from reading the higher fan journalism, funny people are really deeply unhappy. They had childhoods that make Charles Dickens's blacking factory seem like Charles Ryder's golden summer with Sebastian at Oxford. And so I approached Russell Baker's autobiography, "Growing Up," with high anticipation, expecting a heartening read about someone more miserable than I am. Alas, I was deeply disappointed. To come straight out with it, Russell Baker, who writes funny...

[Russell Baker] has written a book whose laughter better serves the cause of what is truly serious and solemn than any thundering from a pulpit. The author's finely tuned moral and esthetic instincts have been jarred in equal measure by the disfigurements Washington produces in some men, and by the nation's unwarranted fear of its own capital. However, the reformist counter-attack Mr. Baker mounts in "An American in Washington" resembles a prose-cartoon, and not the Book of Deute...

[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 B...

Russell Baker, The New York Times "Observer" columnist, is one of the two funniest and more enlightening commentators on the Washington scene. (The other is Art Buchwald.) Mr. Baker's latest book ["Our Next President"] … tells "The Incredible Story of What Happened in the 1968 Elections." It is not the first spoof on the upcoming Presidential campaigns, nor will it be the last…. Mr. Baker's new scenario provokes one or two chuckles, but w...

What do you say about a memoir that has made you cry, made you laugh, brought back streets, sounds and hours of your own growing up and helped you look at them with more tenderness? In Russell Baker's "Growing Up," that is what can happen to anyone who has known, in childhood, the rural South, when, as the family sat in their rockers in the evening, "nothing new had been said on that porch in a hundred years." This is not the dirt-poor South of easy fiction. With sensuous ...

For a journalist there's nothing, so to speak, like getting ahead of the news. So [in Our Next President] Russell Baker has written the story of the 1968 presidential election in advance. He does it delightfully. And in many respects, he could be right. In one or two details, the facts have already caught up with Mr. Baker. He did not anticipate George Romney's pullout. He did not anticipate Senator Eugene McCarthy's strong showing. But let us not be picayune. The crystal ball is bound ...

In the old fairy tale, the grumpy king runs a contest to find a jester who can make him laugh. Unsuccessful contestants go to the block. The winner gets a new suit of motley and the next-to-impossible job of making the king laugh again. In journalism, the dyspeptic despot is usually played by an editor who starts off saying something like "This page is too damn dull. It needs some humor." Serious words are then circulated among the clever headline writers and droll city-room pinochle players t...

Reading "Poor Russell's Almanac" is a lot like visiting the Internal Revenue Service—with somebody else's tax return! If you have ever changed a flat tire in the rain, tripped over the flowers on the rug or spilled gravy on your Aunt Agatha's canary, then this book is for you.

"Observer" columns from Russell Baker are the perfect light-beer chasers for the hard-stuff of daily news—but few of the short pieces in this pleasant, bland collection [So This Is Depravity] stand up well to the sterner tests of time and hard-cover compilation. The most obvious sufferers from the format, of course, are dated columns on the political scene—lots on Watergate—that are usually common-sensical enough …, yet often over-simplified and a bit preachy. But o...

Russell Baker is perhaps the funniest newspaper columnist there is, and, after Murray Kempton, the finest stylist in contemporary journalism. Regrettably, his lyrical and wildly inventive social satire has until now been limited to appearances in the drab and leaden columns of the New York Times. [No Cause for Panic] not only takes him out of the Times but should put him on the shelves of connoisseurs of first-rate humor. Ninety-four of Baker's best are reprinted here. They are topical and they are c...

[In Growing Up] Russell Baker, the New York Times "Observer" columnist, turns his talent to autobiography. The results are as happy as his fellow Baltimorean H. L. Mencken's were when he ventured into the form in his Days books. Baker has shown his readers some of this material before—notably in 1979, the year he won the Pulitzer Prize—but the story is especially well told here…. This is as much the story of Lucy Baker's struggling against the Depression as i...

The only thing worrisome about [An American in Washington, a] wild Lord Bryce's guide on how Washington's denizens behave, is that someone may regard it as true to life. That said, one can proceed to report that this Coney-Island-mirror view of the waltzings and posings and peccadilloes of Washington's politicians, hostesses, cocktail-party givers, am-Russell (Wayne) Baker 1925– © 1984 Thomas Victorbassador...

Baker's squibs and brief forays have an uncommon ability to touch the center of our private perceptions. His subject [in All Things Considered] is the modern U.S. culture as viewed through the eyes of the New York Times—our 100-eyed cultural Argus…. He revamps the plots of Anna Karenina by Henry Miller, Heidi by Terry Southern, Huckleberry Finn by James Baldwin, A Tale of Two Cities by Joseph Heller, Wuthering Heights by Tennessee Williams, and The Iliad by Norman Mailer, and does it am...

Baker's method [in No Cause for Panic] is irony rather than whimsy, sarcasm rather than ranting. His material is the entire United States of America and his talent is of matching size. He is capable of parody, poetry, galloping fantasy, wistful poignancy, and the simple sneer. He holds himself in constant contempt of Congress, and with grisly joy predicts a time when that body, clogged and rusted at last into utter immobility, will be made a branch of the Smithsonian Institution. On the subject of go...

Few things soften and grow moldy quicker than collections of stuff written for newspapers. But Baker … [survives] very well when pressed between the covers of a book…. The 100 or so of his columns tied together [in The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams] have nothing in common except that all are written in an easy, slippered prose. Always observant, Baker is in turn reminiscent, fanciful, serious, thought-provoking, and downright funny. Among his topics are Brideshead Revisited, Leo...

Russell Baker, a New York Times Washington correspondent, gets a lot off his chest [in An American in Washington] writing about Washington as a tribal entity, filled with bizarre customs. Considerable information is packed into chapters satirizing Society, Bureaucrats, Diplomats, Congress, the Presidency, etc. But the style is difficult, overcrowded with metaphors, and only fairly successful in its humor…. A sketch book, in which the individual scenes are sharper than the end view, and more satisfyin...

As expected, nothing is immune to Baker's unique comedic observations—the MX missile ("Merrily We Pentagon"), New Yorkers' dogs ("Beastly Manhattan"), Marcel Proust ("Things Passed")—in [The Rescue of Miss Yaskell], the title piece being a charming evocation of boyish fantasy. This gathering will entertain first-time readers, refresh the risibilities of fans and do much to elevate the status of the personal essay. A review of...