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The Good Times
Picking up where Growing Up left off, the noted columnist recounts his odyssey from writing police reports in Baltimore to penning news stories about the Queen of England, offering his wisdom on the grownup world. Reprint. NYT.
Hardcover
First published June 1, 1989
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About the author
Russell Baker
67 books99 followersOn August 14, 1925, US journalist, humorist and biographer Russell Baker was born in Loudoun County, Virginia. His father died early on and his hard-working mother reared him and his sisters during the Great Depression. Baker managed to get himself into Johns Hopkins University, where he studied journalism.
Baker’s wit as a humorist has been compared with that of Mark Twain. “The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer,” wrote Baker, “and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.” In 1979, Baker received his first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in his “Observer” column for the New York Times (1962 to 1998). His 1983 autobiography, Growing Up earned him a second Pulitzer. In 1993, Baker began hosting the PBS television series Masterpiece Theatre.
Neil Postman, in the preface to Conscientious Objections, describes Baker as "like some fourth century citizen of Rome who is amused and intrigued by the Empire's collapse but who still cares enough to mock the stupidities that are hastening its end. He is, in my opinion, a precious national resource, and as long as he does not get his own television show, America will remain stronger than Russia." (1991, xii)
Baker’s wit as a humorist has been compared with that of Mark Twain. “The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer,” wrote Baker, “and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.” In 1979, Baker received his first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in his “Observer” column for the New York Times (1962 to 1998). His 1983 autobiography, Growing Up earned him a second Pulitzer. In 1993, Baker began hosting the PBS television series Masterpiece Theatre.
Neil Postman, in the preface to Conscientious Objections, describes Baker as "like some fourth century citizen of Rome who is amused and intrigued by the Empire's collapse but who still cares enough to mock the stupidities that are hastening its end. He is, in my opinion, a precious national resource, and as long as he does not get his own television show, America will remain stronger than Russia." (1991, xii)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
February 26, 2019
I was very surprised to learn what it's really like to be a newspaper reporter.
March 9, 2019
What a delightful, unassuming man. I would have loved to have met and talked with him. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. An education of what is was like to move up and through the ranks in newspaper reporting.
Not as hilariously funny as "Growing Up", but not meant to be as he was now in a different phase of life, but entertaining nonetheless.
Not as hilariously funny as "Growing Up", but not meant to be as he was now in a different phase of life, but entertaining nonetheless.
October 19, 2011
I began reading this book twice. I hate reading something and not finishing it, so I tired and tried. It actually gets a bit less dry as the chapters move along. I was unaware at first that this was an autobiography, and indeed it does read like a curriculum vitae. It tells us the story of Russel Baker, who is at first driven to "do well"by his mother and then by his inner guardian. His "arch enemy" is his cousin Edwin, who was a very well known managing editor for the Times. Russell begins his journalistic career as a delivery boy and then a school news writer. He soon moves on to Crime reporter to rewrite man to correspondent to International correspondent to White House correspondent at the Sun; and then to having his very own column at the Times.
What makes this book work is the stories that he lives through including being invited to the Queen's coronation and arriving by foot and bringing a brown bag lunch along... It was interesting to read about the different levels within a newspaper and what are the things that make it tick.
My favorite quote: "Coming from a journalistic tradition that licensed hotshots to make the language churn and steam, I was excited to discover that quiet could often pack more punch into a story than turmoil could. Example: "When he rose in the House Mister Eden had nothing to say but made the mistake of saying it at great length, omitting hardly a single flatulent Office Cliché" (pg. 237)
What makes this book work is the stories that he lives through including being invited to the Queen's coronation and arriving by foot and bringing a brown bag lunch along... It was interesting to read about the different levels within a newspaper and what are the things that make it tick.
My favorite quote: "Coming from a journalistic tradition that licensed hotshots to make the language churn and steam, I was excited to discover that quiet could often pack more punch into a story than turmoil could. Example: "When he rose in the House Mister Eden had nothing to say but made the mistake of saying it at great length, omitting hardly a single flatulent Office Cliché" (pg. 237)
August 11, 2016
Thoughtful, insightful, endearing and so simply and well-written. I reflected on the history of the USA in the 20th century via a newspaper reporter/columnist perspective. I look forward to reading Russell Baker's Growing Up (he received Pulitzer prize) again as well as There's a Country in My Cellar (includes much of his column for the NYT).
June 15, 2017
This was a good follow up to Growing Up, a bit more jaded and of course more mature. I liked it better on the second reading than the first (which was years ago). Self-deprecating humor is a Baker specialty; this has a lot.
February 26, 2010
Most enjoyable memoir of growing up as a journalist/humorist in America the 50s & 60s.
August 16, 2024
Russell Baker demonstrated that a good writer can craft more than one enduring memoir, focusing on different stages or tasks, in one’s life. Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Growing Up was published in 1982. Growing Up describes Baker’s childhood and young adulthood, revealing how the author and his family survived the Depression and World War II. The Good Times was published seven years later in 1989. The Good Times catalogs Russell’s education and developing career as a newspaper reporter, columnist, and author.
Both of Baker’s memoirs include descriptions of Russell’s relationship with multiple family members and friends. The main theme of Growing Up, the relationship of Russell with his mother, is more of a subplot to The Good Times. Both books provide important insights into mother–son dynamics. Baker’s memoirs document the lifelong (and even after death) effect of a mother’s influence on the life of her son (magnified in Russell’s case by the early death of his father, when Russell was only six). “My mother, dead now to this world but still roaming free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak”… with her oft-repeated wisdom:
• “… Russell, you’ve got no more gumption than a bump on a log.”
• “Don’t you want to amount to something?”
• “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a quitter.”
• “Have a little ambition, Buddy.”
• “Sometimes you act like you’re not worth the powder to blow you up…”
• “Edwin James (Baker’s cousin who became the Editor of The New York Times, and therefore, the paragon of literary success for Russell’s mother) is no smarter than anyone else… and look where he is today…”
• “My God, Russell, you don’t know any more about humanity’s dreams and sorrow than a hog knows about holiday.”
• “You might as well blow your own horn because nobody’s going to blow it for you”
The Good Times also documents, in Baker’s satirical and humorous style, the impact of the second most important relationship in his life – the relationship with his wife Mimi. Mimi had been an orphan and grew up in a home for abandoned children. Throughout their marriage, Russell’s mother patronized Mimi, as she had been patronized by his grandmother. Four years into their relationship but before they had been married, Mimi tried to get Russell to take her on vacation to Ocean City, NJ. Instead, he went with friends to Provincetown, Cape Cod, and even rebuked her attempts to meet up in Ocean City for one week. Finally, Mimi threatened to move to Texas, which would have ended their relationship. Chastened, Russell had to backtrack and after much fighting, married Mimi in a Lutheran church chosen by his mother.
The couple immediately spent themselves into debt and found Mimi pregnant with their first child. As always, Russell’s mother was available for comment, “I didn’t expect my mother to take it well when I told her Mimi was pregnant, and she didn’t… ‘When you give hostages to fortune, you’d better be ready to pay the piper’ …” On the day of delivery, Russell slept through the birth of his child, and could not afford flowers to take to his wife; instead, his newspaper sent roses to Mimi. Throughout The Good Times, Baker makes it clear that being a father is less important to him than career advancement. Later, in the book, he regrets the fact his children seem to have rejected his generation’s value system (‘making it’ and the ‘rat race’) presumably spawned by enduring the Depression.
The Good Times includes poignant accounts of mentors or father surrogates, who influenced Russell psychosocially and professionally. An important example was Ed Young. Ed Young, city editor, and Russell’s boss for a time, modeled excellence in journalism: “Young on the city desk taught me respect for journalism. Until then I had taken the wise-guy view that it was a trivial, second-rate business for boozers, incompetent romantics, and failed writers… My ambition to outshine Cousin Edward reflected these attitudes. Nothing could have been more arrogant or foolish than the notion that, without any special education or training, I could someday match Edwin’s achievements. I didn’t think of them as achievements but as adventures, as fun for grownups… Serious men, I thought, wrote novels…. After working with Ed Young, I grew up enough to smile at the childishness of the idea… By then, at age twenty-four, I had tried enough fiction to know I had no talent for it. Worse, I didn’t even enjoy writing it… Ed rarely lectured… Everything about the way he did the job simply insisted that journalism was serious work for serious people.” Baker paints pictures of heroes and how we hero-worshippers are transformed by their behavior modeling: “The strange thing is that almost all of us, even those who were driven away, loved the paper and believed it was a good paper and could even be a great paper. This was probably why so many of us gave our hearts to Ed Young. He embodied our conviction that we were doing something terribly important and ought to keep doing it even though the people who owned it and ran it didn’t seem to understand why we cared.”
Russell lived to achieve much of the success he had sought, only to find that it was not as fulfilling as he had imagined. “Now that I seemed to amount to something, how was life different? Once you made something of yourself, life should change, shouldn’t it?... I was discovering, though I didn’t realize it then, the hunger for success was bred deeply into so many Depression youngsters that we were powerless to stop chasing it long after we had achieved it. Or had ‘made it’ in the slang of the era. The hunger to ‘make it’ was the motor to our ambition, and it was almost impossible to turn it off… If we made it, we were not satisfied. We wanted to make it big. If we made it big, we wanted to make it bigger. About this time, self-mocking people began to talk of the ‘rat race’. The self-mockery didn’t stop many people from running it. Ten years later, our own children would strike broadly at us by rejecting the successful lives we had prepared for them, but in 1954 nobody, absolutely nobody, could see that coming.”
“The obit (obituary of Cousin Edwin in his New York Times) was singularly lifeless, giving no suggestion that he had ever had more than two breaths of humanity in him. By then I had written enough obits to recognize the symptoms. Whoever had written poor Edmund’s send-off had been too floored by reverence to fear to dare suggest that he had once been human…”
Analogous to his ambivalence about the ‘success’ of Cousin Edwin, Russell described several moral conflicts during his developing, reporting career such as coloring ‘objective journalism’ with personal opinions and using one’s writing to self-aggrandize. Many of these conflicts arose during his period as the London correspondent for his newspaper, and Baker conflated many of these conflicts with his interpretation of American versus British values and styles.
• “Until that night I had held religiously to the American faith in ‘objective journalism’…”
• “For a reporter … to question the value of ‘objective journalism’ was worse than unthinkable. It was subversive. It was revolutionary. Now I was not just questioning it; I was thrusting my own judgment into a story…”
• “By contrast, I had an American childhood. ‘Might as well blow your own horn because nobody’s going to blow it for you’ was my mother’s advice. Blowing your own horn was the American way…”
In each of these vignettes, Baker’s satire reminds me of Mark Twain’s autobiographical works.
Russell Baker concludes his professional memoir with the aging, dementia, and death of his mother. Her life provided a perspective from which he could put his career and its purpose and meaning into context. “When my mother died in 1984 we went back to the Virginia churchyard where my father and Herb (Russell’s stepfather) were buried… ‘They’ll never get me back to those sticks’ she used to say in those Depression days after she had taken Doris (his sister) and me out of Virginia and made us city people in New Jersey… She was talking of Morrisonville, the village where I was born. It lay in the Loudon Valley of Northern Virginia… She had been brave then. Maybe the bravest of all the brave things she did was giving Audrey, her baby, only ten months old, up for adoption by my Uncle and Aunt…”
At the end of The Good Times, Russell Baker reports a calm that is far beyond resignation with one’s fate. His mother had become a metaphor for satisfaction in a life in which Russell has ‘shown some gumption’ and ‘made something of himself’, after all: “Maybe it was only bravado, which was lost on a boy, but I was middle age and had seen half the world before I came back to Morrisonville one day and gazed at its wonder, thinking My God, this is one of the most beautiful places I have seen… For me it had been a mean and shabby place from which to escape… So bringing her back at the end was not a vengeful attempt to have the last word in the lifelong argument between us. It was done out of a sense that a family is many generations closely woven; that though generations die, they endure as part of the fabric of the family; that the burying place is a good place to remind the living that they have debts to the past… Our sorrow that day was tempered by relief. After six years of the nursing home, of watching her change into someone else, and then into nobody at all, death seemed not unwelcome.”
I loved reading Growing Up and The Good Times. They both remind me of the gallows humor and pathos of Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes, Tis, and Teacher Man. And they resonate for me with the all-American satire, insight, and humanity of Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Huckleberry Finn, and The Innocents Abroad. All of these books are helping me realize gratitude in my life, and inspiring me to contemplate writing another memoir.
Both of Baker’s memoirs include descriptions of Russell’s relationship with multiple family members and friends. The main theme of Growing Up, the relationship of Russell with his mother, is more of a subplot to The Good Times. Both books provide important insights into mother–son dynamics. Baker’s memoirs document the lifelong (and even after death) effect of a mother’s influence on the life of her son (magnified in Russell’s case by the early death of his father, when Russell was only six). “My mother, dead now to this world but still roaming free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak”… with her oft-repeated wisdom:
• “… Russell, you’ve got no more gumption than a bump on a log.”
• “Don’t you want to amount to something?”
• “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a quitter.”
• “Have a little ambition, Buddy.”
• “Sometimes you act like you’re not worth the powder to blow you up…”
• “Edwin James (Baker’s cousin who became the Editor of The New York Times, and therefore, the paragon of literary success for Russell’s mother) is no smarter than anyone else… and look where he is today…”
• “My God, Russell, you don’t know any more about humanity’s dreams and sorrow than a hog knows about holiday.”
• “You might as well blow your own horn because nobody’s going to blow it for you”
The Good Times also documents, in Baker’s satirical and humorous style, the impact of the second most important relationship in his life – the relationship with his wife Mimi. Mimi had been an orphan and grew up in a home for abandoned children. Throughout their marriage, Russell’s mother patronized Mimi, as she had been patronized by his grandmother. Four years into their relationship but before they had been married, Mimi tried to get Russell to take her on vacation to Ocean City, NJ. Instead, he went with friends to Provincetown, Cape Cod, and even rebuked her attempts to meet up in Ocean City for one week. Finally, Mimi threatened to move to Texas, which would have ended their relationship. Chastened, Russell had to backtrack and after much fighting, married Mimi in a Lutheran church chosen by his mother.
The couple immediately spent themselves into debt and found Mimi pregnant with their first child. As always, Russell’s mother was available for comment, “I didn’t expect my mother to take it well when I told her Mimi was pregnant, and she didn’t… ‘When you give hostages to fortune, you’d better be ready to pay the piper’ …” On the day of delivery, Russell slept through the birth of his child, and could not afford flowers to take to his wife; instead, his newspaper sent roses to Mimi. Throughout The Good Times, Baker makes it clear that being a father is less important to him than career advancement. Later, in the book, he regrets the fact his children seem to have rejected his generation’s value system (‘making it’ and the ‘rat race’) presumably spawned by enduring the Depression.
The Good Times includes poignant accounts of mentors or father surrogates, who influenced Russell psychosocially and professionally. An important example was Ed Young. Ed Young, city editor, and Russell’s boss for a time, modeled excellence in journalism: “Young on the city desk taught me respect for journalism. Until then I had taken the wise-guy view that it was a trivial, second-rate business for boozers, incompetent romantics, and failed writers… My ambition to outshine Cousin Edward reflected these attitudes. Nothing could have been more arrogant or foolish than the notion that, without any special education or training, I could someday match Edwin’s achievements. I didn’t think of them as achievements but as adventures, as fun for grownups… Serious men, I thought, wrote novels…. After working with Ed Young, I grew up enough to smile at the childishness of the idea… By then, at age twenty-four, I had tried enough fiction to know I had no talent for it. Worse, I didn’t even enjoy writing it… Ed rarely lectured… Everything about the way he did the job simply insisted that journalism was serious work for serious people.” Baker paints pictures of heroes and how we hero-worshippers are transformed by their behavior modeling: “The strange thing is that almost all of us, even those who were driven away, loved the paper and believed it was a good paper and could even be a great paper. This was probably why so many of us gave our hearts to Ed Young. He embodied our conviction that we were doing something terribly important and ought to keep doing it even though the people who owned it and ran it didn’t seem to understand why we cared.”
Russell lived to achieve much of the success he had sought, only to find that it was not as fulfilling as he had imagined. “Now that I seemed to amount to something, how was life different? Once you made something of yourself, life should change, shouldn’t it?... I was discovering, though I didn’t realize it then, the hunger for success was bred deeply into so many Depression youngsters that we were powerless to stop chasing it long after we had achieved it. Or had ‘made it’ in the slang of the era. The hunger to ‘make it’ was the motor to our ambition, and it was almost impossible to turn it off… If we made it, we were not satisfied. We wanted to make it big. If we made it big, we wanted to make it bigger. About this time, self-mocking people began to talk of the ‘rat race’. The self-mockery didn’t stop many people from running it. Ten years later, our own children would strike broadly at us by rejecting the successful lives we had prepared for them, but in 1954 nobody, absolutely nobody, could see that coming.”
“The obit (obituary of Cousin Edwin in his New York Times) was singularly lifeless, giving no suggestion that he had ever had more than two breaths of humanity in him. By then I had written enough obits to recognize the symptoms. Whoever had written poor Edmund’s send-off had been too floored by reverence to fear to dare suggest that he had once been human…”
Analogous to his ambivalence about the ‘success’ of Cousin Edwin, Russell described several moral conflicts during his developing, reporting career such as coloring ‘objective journalism’ with personal opinions and using one’s writing to self-aggrandize. Many of these conflicts arose during his period as the London correspondent for his newspaper, and Baker conflated many of these conflicts with his interpretation of American versus British values and styles.
• “Until that night I had held religiously to the American faith in ‘objective journalism’…”
• “For a reporter … to question the value of ‘objective journalism’ was worse than unthinkable. It was subversive. It was revolutionary. Now I was not just questioning it; I was thrusting my own judgment into a story…”
• “By contrast, I had an American childhood. ‘Might as well blow your own horn because nobody’s going to blow it for you’ was my mother’s advice. Blowing your own horn was the American way…”
In each of these vignettes, Baker’s satire reminds me of Mark Twain’s autobiographical works.
Russell Baker concludes his professional memoir with the aging, dementia, and death of his mother. Her life provided a perspective from which he could put his career and its purpose and meaning into context. “When my mother died in 1984 we went back to the Virginia churchyard where my father and Herb (Russell’s stepfather) were buried… ‘They’ll never get me back to those sticks’ she used to say in those Depression days after she had taken Doris (his sister) and me out of Virginia and made us city people in New Jersey… She was talking of Morrisonville, the village where I was born. It lay in the Loudon Valley of Northern Virginia… She had been brave then. Maybe the bravest of all the brave things she did was giving Audrey, her baby, only ten months old, up for adoption by my Uncle and Aunt…”
At the end of The Good Times, Russell Baker reports a calm that is far beyond resignation with one’s fate. His mother had become a metaphor for satisfaction in a life in which Russell has ‘shown some gumption’ and ‘made something of himself’, after all: “Maybe it was only bravado, which was lost on a boy, but I was middle age and had seen half the world before I came back to Morrisonville one day and gazed at its wonder, thinking My God, this is one of the most beautiful places I have seen… For me it had been a mean and shabby place from which to escape… So bringing her back at the end was not a vengeful attempt to have the last word in the lifelong argument between us. It was done out of a sense that a family is many generations closely woven; that though generations die, they endure as part of the fabric of the family; that the burying place is a good place to remind the living that they have debts to the past… Our sorrow that day was tempered by relief. After six years of the nursing home, of watching her change into someone else, and then into nobody at all, death seemed not unwelcome.”
I loved reading Growing Up and The Good Times. They both remind me of the gallows humor and pathos of Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes, Tis, and Teacher Man. And they resonate for me with the all-American satire, insight, and humanity of Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Huckleberry Finn, and The Innocents Abroad. All of these books are helping me realize gratitude in my life, and inspiring me to contemplate writing another memoir.
March 1, 2019
Interesting memoir of a bygone era by a reporter and then longtime columnist of the New York Times.
August 6, 2007
Favorite memoirist. I wish he wrote more.
Read
March 7, 2008070.924
April 10, 2012
Recommended by my journalist husband, this was an enjoyable trip into the past. Light reading though, so definitely appropriate for beaches, airplanes, etc.
April 23, 2012
Nice read........ but after reading Growing up by the same author lot of renundant information is there... i would suggest that only on of the book should be read...
November 5, 2020
Russell Baker's autobiography, Growing Up, is one of my all-time favorite books. This is the sequel to that book--good, but not nearly as satisfying as Growing Up.
August 22, 2022
Follow up to a book I really liked, Growing Up. The Good Times not as good, but I still enjoyed it.
November 26, 2013
Not really my type of book.
November 14, 2014
A fun and interesting read. While not quite as moving as "Growing Up," the book is fascinating on many levels, not least Baker's time as head of the Sun's London Bureau. I highly recommend it.
March 25, 2016
Russell Baker, HB-B, @ 1989, 1/90. Picking up where Growing Up left off, Journalist Russell Baker tells the story of his adult life as a journalist in Baltimore. Very good.
March 9, 2016
I read Russell Baker's column in the NYTs and was connected. So, I read this and more...
I'm aging myself!
I'm aging myself!
May 14, 2016
Russell Baker's "The Good Times" is a classic, intelligent ,comedic read.
May 4, 2023
This is an older book, written in 1989, but still well worth a read. It offers a fascinating bird’s-eye look at what it was like to work as a newspaper reporter before the advent of the internet or even the electric typewriter and portable tape recorder. The book mostly focuses on the years from 1947 to 1962 and includes Baker’s recollections about a variety of famous people he encountered on the job, including Evelyn Waugh, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, JFK, RFK, and actress June Lockhart. There is also a lovely elegiac tribute to his mother upon her death, reflecting on her lifelong role in encouraging him to show some gumption and make something of himself.
Coincidentally, I read Baker’s account of Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation ceremony during all the hoopla leading up to Charles’s coronation in 2023 and was struck by how much simpler the event was the last time the UK crowned a monarch. In 1953, Baker was a young, inexperienced reporter for the Baltimore Sun and was permitted to take two sandwiches in a brown paper bag to Westminster Abbey to eat during the proceedings!
Although Baker had already won two Pulitzer prizes when he penned this sequel to his memoir Growing Up, he writes in a likeable, self-deprecating style, often poking fun at his grand ambitions as a young man and offering generous, plentiful praise for the newspaper men (newspaper women were very scarce in those days) who mentored and encouraged him
Coincidentally, I read Baker’s account of Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation ceremony during all the hoopla leading up to Charles’s coronation in 2023 and was struck by how much simpler the event was the last time the UK crowned a monarch. In 1953, Baker was a young, inexperienced reporter for the Baltimore Sun and was permitted to take two sandwiches in a brown paper bag to Westminster Abbey to eat during the proceedings!
Although Baker had already won two Pulitzer prizes when he penned this sequel to his memoir Growing Up, he writes in a likeable, self-deprecating style, often poking fun at his grand ambitions as a young man and offering generous, plentiful praise for the newspaper men (newspaper women were very scarce in those days) who mentored and encouraged him
June 26, 2023
Following onto his Pulitzer Prize winning 'Growing Up,' Russell Baker continues his life story in 'The Good Times.' If you ever saw Russell Baker opening 'Masterpiece Theater' on PBS television (which he hosted from 1992 to 2004) or heard him in interviews (available on YouTube), you can definitely hear his voice in his writing.
'The Good Times' tells the story of Russell Baker's life as a newspaper reporter and correspondent from 1947 to 1962. He received his degree in English at Johns Hopkins University in 1947 and quickly took a job as a police reporter for the 'Baltimore Sun.' He later became the chief of the Sun's London bureau, then Washington (DC) correspondent. He later moved to the 'New York Times' and continued reporting on Congress, various governmental departments, the White House and the President.
Sometimes lamenting his decisions to "move up" and always hearing his Mother saying to "make something of yourself," Baker describes the events he witnessed and people he worked with. You'll find his modesty, humility, and humor in this book. If you haven't read 'Growing Up,' I recommend you start there.
'The Good Times' tells the story of Russell Baker's life as a newspaper reporter and correspondent from 1947 to 1962. He received his degree in English at Johns Hopkins University in 1947 and quickly took a job as a police reporter for the 'Baltimore Sun.' He later became the chief of the Sun's London bureau, then Washington (DC) correspondent. He later moved to the 'New York Times' and continued reporting on Congress, various governmental departments, the White House and the President.
Sometimes lamenting his decisions to "move up" and always hearing his Mother saying to "make something of yourself," Baker describes the events he witnessed and people he worked with. You'll find his modesty, humility, and humor in this book. If you haven't read 'Growing Up,' I recommend you start there.
April 7, 2019
There are a few times when it reaches the heights of the first memoir, mainly when dealing in self-deprecation. Baker does a decent job analyzing what he does well when writing. He attempts to not give himself a free pass. His observations of Lyndon Johnson seem perceptive.
That's about all of the positives. He gives over to a little bit of whining. He's a little ungenerous about his peers. His family disappears completely, except to cause guilt pangs. His observations about the political world and the pointlessness of focusing on policy have aged very, very poorly.
In essence, he's a victim of the excellence of the first book. This is a pale shadow. The best part might be the last four pages, which really belong as part of a second edition of the first book.
Edited to add: After reading James Reston's Wikipedia entry, I see that Russell Baker did something sort-of-subtle in this volume, using his extended critique of Bill Lawrence to stand in for a critique of Reston. Adds an extra dash of quality and interest to this.
That's about all of the positives. He gives over to a little bit of whining. He's a little ungenerous about his peers. His family disappears completely, except to cause guilt pangs. His observations about the political world and the pointlessness of focusing on policy have aged very, very poorly.
In essence, he's a victim of the excellence of the first book. This is a pale shadow. The best part might be the last four pages, which really belong as part of a second edition of the first book.
Edited to add: After reading James Reston's Wikipedia entry, I see that Russell Baker did something sort-of-subtle in this volume, using his extended critique of Bill Lawrence to stand in for a critique of Reston. Adds an extra dash of quality and interest to this.
January 25, 2021
The sequel to Growing Up isn’t as good, although that would have been a tall order. Instead it’s an absorbing account of his first 15 years as a journalist from 1947 to 1962. When he started at the Baltimore Sun, there were still some grizzled veterans on the “lobster shift” who remembered when typewriters had been introduced to the newsroom in 1892. Even when the book ends with his becoming a columnist at The New York Times, it was still a world of morning and afternoon editions, portable typewriters, the three martini lunch, and concern about the competition, The New York Herald Tribune.
It’s also a reflection on his driving ambition, which had been instilled by his mother, and contrasting it with his own children’s more relaxed attitude. He’s not sure whether it was he or his mother who failed as a parent, but he acknowledges having been largely an absentee parent as a 50s dad.
It’s also a reflection on his driving ambition, which had been instilled by his mother, and contrasting it with his own children’s more relaxed attitude. He’s not sure whether it was he or his mother who failed as a parent, but he acknowledges having been largely an absentee parent as a 50s dad.
August 13, 2019
I loved reading this memoir. Starting out as a journalist myself, and old enough to know that I had experienced many of the same “newspapering” norms and “rules of the road,” made this such a deep, good read for me. Baker was a wonderful writer. His skill, paired with his candor about his own hard lessons and his personal honesty, was refreshing to devour in these crazy times. I particularly enjoyed the final few chapters about Kennedy’s election in 1960 and the resulting downfall of a star reporter (not Baker) who fell from grace.
August 18, 2020
Reading this book was like giving myself a special treat. He wrote about his career in fascinating detail, including his interactions with bosses, co-workers and presidents. His writing is informative with a dry wit. I wish I could write more eloquently about my thoughts on this book, but my overall feeling is an admiration for the man's straightforward story and the way he expressed himself. (I'm now reading Growing Up.)
January 21, 2024
The life of a newspaper reporter sounds glamorous but the road is long and arduous. I had no idea the struggles it took to become a successful journalist. Interesting book that tells of how the author moved through the ranks from following the police beat to reporting on presidential candidates. I really enjoyed the author’s other autobiography, Growing Up, which illustrates the hardships of growing up in the Great Depression, so I was excited to read the next stage of his life.
April 7, 2021
Since I had hoped that this book would be as delightful as Russell Baker's first book, "Growing Up," I was greatly disappointed. I guess it should come as no surprise that you can buy a used hardcover copy of "The Good Times" on Amazon for just 59 cents!
July 30, 2019
so good to read russell baker's words again.... he was always a favorite of mine.
October 15, 2019
Read for the second time. No wonder he won a Pulitzer.
February 26, 2025
Witty and introspective memoir. Russell Baker is such a good writer.
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