Let Me Finish: A Moving and Funny Memoir in Essays―A New Yorker Life in Baseball and Family

by Roger Angell

Widely known as an original and graceful writer, Roger Angell has developed a devoted following through his essays in the New Yorker. Now, in Let Me Finish, a deeply personal, fresh form of autobiography, he takes an unsentimental look at his early days as a boy growing up in Prohibition-era New York with a remarkable father; a mother, Katharine White, who was a founding editor of the New Yorker; and a famous stepfather, the writer E. B. White.

Intimate, funny, and moving portraits form the book’s centerpiece as Angell remembers his surprising relatives, his early attraction to baseball in the time of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and his vivid colleagues during a long career as a New Yorker writer and editor. Infused with pleasure and sadness, Angell’s disarming memoir also evokes an attachment to life’s better moments.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Sports, Baseball, Essays, Biography Memoir

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Roger Angell (b. 1920) is a celebrated New Yorker writer and editor. First published in the magazine in 1944, he became a fiction editor and regular contributor in 1956; and remains as a senior editor and staff writer. In addition to seven classic books on baseball, which include The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), and Season Ticket (1988), he has written works of fiction, humor, and a memoir, Let Me Finish (2006).

Reviews

[Jenn Estepp · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never knew how much I needed a only-occasionally-grumpy old man to meander through ruminations of his very interesting life until I downloaded this on a whim and mostly commute read it. I sort of adore Angell now.

[Patrick DiJusto · Rating 4 out of 5]

"After my parent's divorce, I grew up shuttling on the IRT Lexington Avenue express between my father's brownstone and the bohemian apartment in the Village my mother shared with E.B. White, whom we all called Andy, although sometimes I'd take the IRT Lexington Avenue express to visit my father in his prestigious law office in the Wall Street area, before taking the IND Broadway local to visit my mother and Andy in their offices at the New Yorker magazine, where I did my best to avoid New Yorker founder Harold Ross, who would always bellow "Who he?" when he saw me acting as seeing-eye child to James Thurber, and after several consecutive summers with the Walter Lippmans at the house on Sneden's Landing I took the New York Central to The Olde Towne for four years at the Crimson where I met Ambassador Kennedy's son and then almost immediately went into the Army where I was one of the founders of the Army Air Corps newspaper (Mother cried "Shades of Ross!", who founded Stars and Stripes, when she heard) and got the first news reports out of Hiroshima, and then after the war we left the baby behind and took the Ile De France with the Sid Perelmans to Cap d'Antibes on a six month assigment from Holiday Magazine, where we managed to catch Colette's last words, and then by tramp steamer with the William Trevors back to Sneden's Landing and a job with the meticulously polite Bill Shawn at the family store as Fiction Editor, though we still summered with Mother and Andy in Maine where I was the first to read Charotte's Web in holograph manuscript, and then J.D Salinger and John Updike and Alice Munro and Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver and baseball, and then everyone started dying and then glioblastoma and then here we are, boats against the current..."

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent collection of autobiographical essays. I'd only read Angell's baseball writing before (specifically, The Summer Game); there's a little of that here, but what I found particularly compelling were Angell's memories of his parents, of their divorce, and of his mother's remarriage to E. B. White, whom Angell affectionately calls by his nickname, Andy. Also a highlight was the long section on The New Yorker, Angell's longtime employer, with witty, often moving reminiscences of Wallace Shawn and Harold Ross, among others.

[Donn Headley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing up, I loved the New Yorker, even though I could hardly been farther away while being on the same continent. Or more distant in upbringing and class and age and education and historical context than the writers and cartoonists of the "comic weekly." My interest was mainly the humor in either written or visual form, James Thurber and Woody Allen for the former, and Charles Addams and Gahan Wilson for the latter. This collection by one of my favorite writers (mainly baseball) covers many subjects: memory, his family, colleagues at the magazine, sailing, golf, Maine, marriages, life, death, and friends (and baseball). But mostly it's about writing, which he discusses in sterling prose so good that I will not attempt to write about it in my meager and inferior style. Suffice it to say this is bittersweet and perceptive, captivating and timeless. A sheer pleasure, the kind that can only come from a book that opens the world to the engaged reader.

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, I haven't been so homesick for 10 years! Angell, definitely his own man, with his own stories and obsession (baseball, thank goodness), learned at the knees of his mother Katherine White, fiction editor at The New Yorker, and his step-father E.B. White. Reading him feels like being invited over for cocktails and dinner and stories, told from deep armchairs late into the night. These essays feel, to me, like going home.

[Ronald · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing collection of essays. Enjoyed almost every one of them. Will be reading his baseball books next.

[Hughes Rosalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written separate chapters on growing up in NYC, E.B White, New Yorker writers and editors, life and death. I loved it. A couple of slow chapters but they didn’t matter.

[Bonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the son of The New Yorker editor Katharine White and stepson of E.B. White, it was easy for me to think that Roger Angell came by his writing ability through both heredity and environment, but even if those are true, it's evident that he has practiced and honed his craft. His writing is clear, concise, insightful, funny, poignant, and enlightening. I am not personally a big sports fan, but his love of baseball comes through and showed me that there is much more to the game than grown men hitting and throwing a ball.

Angell writes about more than baseball, and his reminiscences are interesting and honest.

I've had a life sheltered by privilege, and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck.

Even if his life is markedly different from mine, this memoir contains much that is familiar to each one of us. The last essay “Hard Lines", about the loss of loved ones was especially moving to me.

Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.

Let Me Finish was the perfect book at the perfect time, and a welcome escape from politics, upheaval, and worry to a kinder, gentler world. Thank you, Melissa!

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roger Angell is one of the New Yorker writers whose columns in that magazine are pieces that I never miss. Even when he's writing about baseball (although I wouldn't read a full-length book on the subject), he is captivating and expresses his thoughts as clearly and cleanly as his stepfather, E.B. White. He is wry and funny, and someone you could easily imagine sitting and talking with easily, hanging onto every word.

This book of memoirs--many, if not all, columns from the New Yorker--covers vignettes of his childhood and remote adulthood, war and career experiences, with some bits of New Yorker life thrown in. He captures a time long gone by, is never, EVER dull, and only makes me hope that all of his columns will someday be collected into a single volume, although this is a good start.

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I shamefacedly admit that i was not very familiar with Angell's New Yorker essays. i see now I should have been reading him. This memoir of his growing up the son and step-son of well known parents and his entrance into his own adult life, including military, marriage and profession held the attention of a reader who really didn't know much about the man. I especially liked how, in each section, it was often the end of the section that was the highlight. I thought he was talking about one thing, but the lens through which he filtered the experience of each chapter offered another and often surprising insight.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

My 2 cents: compelling memoir by the New Yorker's longtime fiction editor and baseball writer. Packed with insights and moving recollections - I couldn't put it down. The best $1.50 I've ever spent at Amazon (an undeserved fate for this book, to be sent to the remainder table, but it's my gain - and someday I'll read it again). "Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around."

[Kupkake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite my complete lack of interest in sports writing, Roger Angell's lineage as the son of Katherine White, stepson of E.B. White, and half brother of Joel White, one of Maine's most beloved boat builders, has always kept me half interested in his writing. This lovely, graceful memoir offers a double dose of White/Angell family history and writing style. Total loss of objectivity on my part, I live in Maine, and love it; work in the marine industry there, and love it; read constantly, and love good, no- great writing, and if all three of those come together? It can't get any better.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Angell's book is not an autobiography. It is a collection of essays, all clearly written, about aspects of his life; e.g., falling in love with cars (driving, anyway) or basebeall ("Early Innings"), or learning that even lives marked by luck and success are touched by heartbreak ("Hard Lines"). Some of the essays ramble on, but the prose is always excellent and Angell is the possessor of what FDR called "a first-rate temperament." Reading the essays led me to his baseball essays (he still writes for the New Yorker at the age of 94): "Five Seasons," "The Boys of Summer," etc

[Rachel Bayles · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's a star.
Some of the funnier and more interesting descriptions of what it means to be a New Yorker, and grow up in New England.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Time and a Place in New York and at The New Yorker

Roger Angell is perhaps best known for his elegant writing about baseball, which found its way into the pages of The New Yorker, where he was an editor for 50 years, and in seven books about the game that he authored. He wrote this memoir in 2006 at the age of 86, and went on to live to age 101.

Angell had an extraordinary life, not the least of which was the luck of being born into a life of privilege. His mother, Katherine White, was a founding editor of The New Yorker. She divorced his father to marry E.B. White, known by the author as “Andy.” The author’s father was a successful and wealthy lawyer who was national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. Growing up, the author and his sister divided their time between two households, both prosperous but only one of which was filled with extraordinary intellectual stimulation.

The first part of this book is a chronicle of that affluent life, which involved private schools, trips to Europe, sailing, and most importantly in the cosmopolitan milieu of his mother and stepfather, dinners with famous writers and intellectuals. The family was untouched by the
Depression.

The book is a collection of reminiscences, some more charming or engaging than others. We are introduced to a variety of characters who were friends of Angell’s mother and step-father, including Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Eugene O’Neill, and Carl Jung — not to mention E.B. White himself. Later, as Angela rose to a senior editorial position at The New Yorker, we have his impression of Gardner Botsford, a contemporary and close friend, William Shawn, and other luminaries at the magazine.

Angell’s good luck held through the war, when he was drafted only to serve through the duration as a stateside instructor. He writes about the gap between teaching and doing, as he lectured on the 50 caliber machine gun, the electric circuit controlling aircraft gunnery, and other weapons of war, without the burden of making such weapons work under the stress of combat.

Angell is an extraordinary stylist, as is clear in a few excerpts of his writing, particularly about baseball. Reminiscing about daily events some 60 years after they occurred, he observes that, “What’s impossible to write down, soon afterward, is a conversation that comes naturally” in later years.

For the most part, this is a memoir carried along with positive memories. But toward the end the recollections, particularly about Angell’s New Yorker colleagues, become sadder and even in cases somewhat bitter.

In finishing the book I could not help but think that this memoir was perhaps past its expiration date in terms of most readers’ interest. Many personalities at The New Yorker are fading from memory even among those who have been loyal readers of the magazine for many years. The baseball accounts, for those who love reading about the players of the last half of the 20th century, are better found in the books that Angela wrote about the game in that era.

[Howard Altarescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brooklyn in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Dodgers when they were in Brooklyn, and later the traumatizing move to Los Angeles… Jackie, Campy, Pee Wee, the Duke, Gil Hodges, Joe Black, Carl Furillo, Preacher Roe, Billy Cox, Clem Labine, Carl Erskine, Andy Pafko. Kahn writes of their playing days and their lives after as well; lots of midwestern boys in this group. Plus, the stars of the New York Giants - home run hitting, Bobby Thomson, head hunting Sal Maglie, Sid Gordon (father of my high school friend) and Herm Franks, grandfather to our friend Mike. There’s also Leo Durocher, Walter O’Malley, Branch Rickey, and the journalists, Red Smith, Dick Young, Red Barber, and Roger Kahn himself.

These players were truly legends of the game. And baseball in the 1950s is truly a foregone era. The differences between the men who played then and now are monumental, in so many ways, not the least of which is their lives after baseball - they all had to work (bartending, construction, etc.) to make a living after their playing days. As I read, I frequently felt as if I was either in a major-league dugout or in the newsroom of the once great and now defunct Herald Tribune. Heaven!

This is the second book where I have had the experience of feeling that I was talking with my Dad. The first was Summer of ‘49, by David Halberstam (the Yankees and the Red Sox, DiMaggio and Williams, the 1949 American League pennant race). Both are marvelous books to read, particularly during baseball season.

- On winning and losing … Roger Kahn on his years covering the Dodgers. “My years with the Dodgers were 1952 and 1953, two seasons in which they lost the World Series to the Yankees. You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.”

- On leaving the team … Clem Labine reflecting on the feeling of leaving the Dodgers when the time came. ”You’re better off. But where are all the guys? Where is everybody you’ve been playing with? You’re not in the fraternity anymore. That’s one of the hardest things.”

- On Jackie Robinson …. “Ya want a guy that comes to play,“ suggests Leo Durocher, whose personal relationship with Robinson was spiky. “This guy didn’t just come to play. He came to beat ya. He come to stuff the goddamn bat right up your ass.”

[Melora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. Roger Angell's memoir, arranged loosely by subject, wanders happily through time, with frequent admissions of the whimsies and vagaries of memory. As he says, “Memory is fiction – an anecdotal version of some scene or past event we need to store away for present or future use,” and readers may well be led to dig into their own archives and to wonder why certain scenes have “stuck” and not others, and why certain memories are shaped as they are. I enjoyed all of the chapters, including those on sailing and baseball, which is a strong testimony to the engaging nature of Angell's writing. His writing is vivid, and there is a sense of immediacy as he seems to examine each memory as it rises up with curiosity, sympathy, and appreciation. Very early on I was taken aback by his story of a day out with his mother and her “lover,” Andy White, but as the book progressed I got over this shock and better recognized the complexities of the lives of these impressive characters. (I recently read E.B. White on Dogs, and really enjoyed the different perspective offered here on White and his family by Angell, his stepson.)

Throughout the book are memories of friends and family who are now gone, each gloriously individual and quirky, presented with dignity and humor. At eighty-six a memoirist is entitled, it seems to me, to occasionally wax a bit melancholy, but Angell never abuses this privilege. His editorial skills have served him well here in selecting the perfect combination of stories – the amusing and the tragic, the heartwarming and the intriguing – to convey the pleasures and pains that must inevitably make up a long life well savored.

[Joan Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charming suggests a book that is coy or cozy; this instead invites the reader into a sophisticated, but warmly authentic milieu, one in which the inhabitants have their quirks, and would accept yours with pleasure. Angell is the son of Katharine White, a founding editor of the New Yorker and he is the stepson of her husband E.B. (Andy) White, vaunted New Yorker regular and author of the children’s classics Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Angell’s father is equally memorable, a New York lawyer and liberal who fought for custody of his children after his divorce from their mother who had fallen in love with her younger colleague at the magazine. Angell’s family on both sides were well-to-do Ivy League alumni, with unforgettable characters as well as many friends of literary and social acclaim, notably the journalist and author Emily (Mickey) Hahn whose rovings took her from Africa to China and elsewhere. Angell himself joined the family tradition as a New Yorker writer and editor whose baseball columns are legendary as well as his numerous books on the sport. Let Me Finish is a memoir told in episodes. He introduces famous friends and relates anecdotes of the New Yorker staff, all without a taint of name-dropping. We are made to feel a part of the New York society whose members survived the Depression, served (and often died) in World War II, graduated from Harvard, Yale or Bryn Mawr and valued good humor, good manners and good times alloyed with plenty of cocktails and various amours. Angell writes with the easy grace of his celestial namesakes and one wishes this book would keep sailing onward.

[Donald Crane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A happy discovery at the library book sale, this memoir seemed, in its first half, to be a little sleepy. The second half saved it.

Angell, who died in May of this year at 101, was a career writer and fiction editor for The New Yorker, continuing his mother Katharine Sergeant White's lifetime as an editor at the same publication, as well as his stepfather E.B. White's long-time involvement as a writer there. (This is the famous E.B. White, author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web.) Angell is widely regarded as one of the best baseball writers of his time - not because he was a sportswriter, but perhaps because he wasn't.

This book consists largely of a collection of essays he wrote over the years that shed some light on his life and the people in it. It seems like the later chapters may have been composed specifically for this book, which may be why it seemed to hold together better for me in the second half. Particularly fascinating is his chapter on fellow New Yorker staff including famed editors Harold Ross and William Shawn and Shawn's deputy, Gardner Botsford (especially him!). I learned lots about the first two whose names I recognized but about whom I knew little; Botsford was completely new to me and Angell's memories of him were delightful.

Likewise, his essay about his childhood visits to Yankee Stadium, where he saw Ruth and Gehrig, and to the New York Giants' Polo Grounds, evoked every child's memories of attending pro baseball games.

Splendid little book; I'm glad I read it.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I own this book, I think it was a gift. The essays are often about baseball (not a big fan myself)...but Angell is, and has written several books about the sport. I especially enjoyed his family essays: his essay on his famous step-father, E. B. White. and a poignant one about his mother, Katherine White, who, with her E.B. White worked at the New Yorker. The essay on sailing, while vivid...feels a little too precious. Every cove and wind and sailboat part is named. It's name-dropping of a natural and nautical sort...but it felt a little too "I'm rich and I rough it in my sail boat" for me. One of my favorite essays was about Jake, a down and out alcoholic who brings a story to Angell, who is a long time an editor at the New Yorker. Angell sees the possibilities and mentors the author, whose story is actually a thinly disguised version of his own hard times. Jake is the perfect student and takes all of Angell's suggestion and revises his story which is eventually published in The New Yorker.

[Clair Keizer · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Roger Angell without hesitation points out in Let Me Finish, grew up a privileged child into adulthood. He doesn't hide it, nor does he apologize for it. More pointedly, Angell notes that in spite of privilege, his life was far from perfect. But he also doesn't make any apologies for this. Instead, Angell graces the reader with a joy and clarity that one must live life to its fullest. Without hesitation, Angell offers names, lists of names of the famous and near famous who touched his life, personally and professionally. His candor and humor invite the reader in to take part in his life, rather than just bear witness to Angell's reporting of history. Angell confesses that as he writes, his memory may be foggy or missing, but his words in retelling of those times more than fills any void. Let Me Finish is more than a memoir; it's a beautifully scripted eye-witness perspective of a time past. And a joy to read.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Angell is mostly remembered for his baseball writing, but he was really more of an heir to the New Yorker journalists from who he descended and the Jazz age New York and New England where he lived.

This is a memoir in the form of a collection of essays about his mother and father, his stepfather E.B. White, and the places that he loved so much. He writes about car travel in an era before superhighways and modern safety and reliability. He writes about being a child of divorced parents and his relationship with his mother, who edited The New Yorker and left his father for another writer E.B. White. He writes about "Andy" White and many of the other famous New Yorker writers with whom he worked.

Some of the essays are more entertaining than others, and I was less entertained by the quieter New England stories late in the book, so a star off, but I always love reading about people whose lives collided with a variety of interesting folks, and Angell was the kind of journeyman writer that I truly respect. I would recommend his book to anyone else who loves these things. I'm going to seek out some of his baseball writing in the future.

[Ann Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Angell grew up in New York City. His father was an attorney. His mother, the fiction editor of The New Yorker. His step father was E. B. White. Angell is well know writer about baseball and he also was a fiction editor for The New Yorker. A child of privilege, he explored the city on his own and with friends before attending Harvard before WWII. I relished his accounts of a childhood so different from that of my own parents and their brothers and sisters, whose background was small town and rural. After graduating college, he joined the Air Force and served during WWII. A very good writer. All his memories appealed to me (I only skimmed through one of the chapters, the one on sailing.) Outstanding were his accounts of the writers he knew while working at The New Yorker. And, his personal remembrances of the great E. B. White, I really treasured.

[Paul Secor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not much of a fan of memoirs. Too many are written by people in their 30's (or even 20's) who haven't experienced enough to write a telling worth reading. My second complaint about memoirs is that they're often just me! me! me!, as if the writer was the only person in their life that readers would want to read about.

That said, I greatly enjoyed reading this memoir/collection of reminiscences/whatever label you may choose to lay on it. Roger Angell had a privileged and charmed life. It seems that he knew that, but he didn't dwell on his own life in this memoir. In fact, he probably wrote more about some of the interesting people he knew - and he knew many - than he wrote about himself.
And this book was published when he was in his mid-80s, so he certainly waited until he had experiences enough to write about.

This book is informative, entertaining, and highly recommended.

[Judith Squires · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've long been familiar with Roger Angell was one of the best baseball writers, ever and knew of his work with the New Yorker, but I was completely unfamiliar with his background. What a long and fascinating life he's had. This book was written when he was past 80, and now he is 101 years old. He had a very privileged upbringing, and the unusual situation of shared custody, which was very rare at that time. Both parents were brilliant, his father an accomplished lawyer and his mother, an editor at the New Yorker. His stepfather was E.B. White. This is a wide ranging book, detailing his childhood love of reptiles, his very progressive school, his wartime service, and even a chapter devoted to the perfect martini. I love memoirs, and this one was very enjoyable.

[Joe Norman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every once in a while, a reader is fortunate enough to pick up a book and discover (about a third of the way in) that he never wants the reading and experiencing of this book to end. Angell, a former editor at The New Yorker, writes with simplicity and elegance. His recollections of events, people, and the times of his life are, at turns, funny, sad, fascinating, sweet, and more. What Angell is able to do with his writing is to place you in and with those memories. What a beautiful writer.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m very glad I finally got around to reading this. It’s been on my shelves a long time. Most of the author’s writing I’ve read is about baseball. This is not about baseball. It is about life. His life. His family’s life. His professional life. He tells stories well and easily and you ride along glad you made the trip. It reminded me of some drives we would take when I was very young. We’d pile in the car on Sunday afternoons and ride through rural Indiana, looking at nothing in particular and everything. This is this book. I liked it.

[Everett Egginton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A look at Roger Angell's early days growing up in NY. Sentimental at times; unsentimental at others. Certainly more than a glimpse into the rarified airs of the erudite writers and editors of the prestigious New Yorker. I liked most of the chapters, some more than others. Several of his reminiscences reminded me in no uncertain terms that I too am aging. I say this because Angell's reminiscences paralleled several of my own.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like that of his stepfather E.B. White, Roger Angell's prose is clear and unadorned, effortlessly pleasing to the eye and ear in a way that belies the hard work of writing and editing that goes into making something seem easy to do. This is a wonderful selection of semi-autobiographical essays, particularly his remembrance of White, simply entitled "Andy."

[Bjipson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Angell is the son of Katharine White and followed her as a fiction editor at The New Yorker. A strong writer in his own right, he talks a little about The New Yorker, about his mother and his stepfather,
E B White, and about various of his memories. This was published in the early 2000s, when he was elderly, and I was reminded of it when he just recently died, at the age of 102!