Andy Rooney at Politics and Prose

Andy Rooney has put out a new book, titled "Out of My Mind". He appeared at Politics and Prose last night with his publisher, Peter Osnos, in dialogue.

He is 87. I don't think he wants to be making appearances like this. He did not make a presentation, but answered questions, first those posed by Osnos and then by the audience. His answers were not expansive, only a few were clever, he told very few tales of his past.

It was not a painful evening, and we did learn a little about his early days as a reporter for the Stars and Stripes during World War II, and his take on journalism and the media today, but you just got the feeling he'd would rather have been somewhere else.

His journalism start came after he was drafted out of Colgate when he was 19, and wound up in England, first in artillery and then in journalism (he'd edited the Colgate paper), where he covered the war for the "Stars and Stripes". Then, he said, reporters had their own jeeps, could buddy up (he often traveled with Ernie Pyle, whom he liked a lot), and go wherever they wanted. You did not have to check in first and say where you were going. Today, he says, the military first needs to know where you are, then prepares people to talk to you, and the news is hardly news. He also says that, in Baghdad, for instance, the journalists are in worst shape because they either stay in the Green Zone, or they go out and get killed.

My guess is that his war time recollections (I think the book is called "My War") make for good reading. Apparently, you can see some of his original dispatches on the Stars and Stripes website.

Does anyone buy his books? I guess so. Does anyone read them? Probably fewer.

I was thinking about all the books that are published as I stood watching him last night and looking around the store. The many chairs were filled when we got there about 15 minutes early.

Who reads all of these books? Who buys them?

I was standing on the cookbook wall, where they have hundreds and hundreds of cookbooks, of every flavor imagineable. Why just where I was standing, right next to my left knee, they had four copies of a very attractive looking book called "The Man and His Meatballs".

No bestseller, this.