Andy Rooney (1919–2011)

My War is a blunt, funny, idiosyncratic account of Andy Rooney’s World War II. As a young, naïve correspondent for The Stars and Stripes, Rooney flew bomber missions, arrived in France during the D-Day invasion, crossed the Rhine with the Allied forces, traveled to Paris for the Liberation, and was one of the first reporters into Buchenwald. Like so many of his generation, Rooney’s life was changed forever by the war. He saw life at the extremes of human experience, and wrote about what show more he observed, making it real to millions of men and women. My War is the story of an inexperienced kid learning the craft of journalism. It is by turns moving, suspenseful, and reflective. And Rooney’s unmistakable voice shines through on every page. show less

There's a television programme here in America called '60 Minutes' which, as you might have guessed, is sixty minutes long. Except it isn't. For if one removes the time spent on commercials then it's probably between 45-50 minutes in length but I'm assuming a tv show with the title '45-50mins Once the Commercials Are Taken Out' is just a little too out there. About once a month, nowadays at least, the last couple of minutes are taken up by an old time radio and television writer named Andy show more Rooney who is as famous for his eyebrows as he is for his journalism. In those two minutes Andy will rant about any given topic of his choosing and the book 'Years of Minutes' is a collection of his rants from 1982-2003 inclusive.
Mr Rooney seems to polarize people in their opinions as it appears a lot of people can't stand him and others think he's great. I happen to fall into the latter category and so it will come as no surprise to you that I loved this book. The only problem I had with it was that it only went up to 2003. Of course, it was published in 2003 so it's not as if they could have added the more recent years but I was just saying is all!
There aren't really any chapters in this book but each section of rants is broken down into the year they took place and the year takes the place of the chapter. Maybe that means there are chapters after all just in the guise of years but bear with me as I'm doing my best here. Each chapter year contains several subtitles describing the rants that appeared during that particular tv season. For instance during the 2002 season he grumbled about libraries and here's a few snippets of what he had to say:

"...silence in a library ought to be abandoned...silence can be more obtrusive than noise because you strain to hear the words of every whisper but you're oblivious to a yell or a shout."

"There are too many blank pages at the beginning and end of most books [with] authors taking up a whole page to say something like TO MY WIFE GRETCHEN WITHOUT WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT THIS BOOK COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN. Why should we waste our time while the author tries to get in good with his wife? If you took all the useless pages out of all the books in a library, they'd save miles of shelf space."

"Dust jackets are a pain in the neck and do not prevent books getting dusty."

Those type of comments are exactly the type of reading you get in this book on subjects from catalogues to cold remedies, from ghostwriters ("General Colin Powell...signed a book contract for $6million...[he] is going to have a ghostwriter...for $6million don't you think he ought to write the book himself?") to football uniforms.
For book lovers there are plenty of book related topics such as those already mentioned as well as many others including cookbooks, school books, magazine page numbers and also dictionaries. He even has a diatribe about his eyebrows!
All in all I found this to be a very entertaining read and with over 500 pages worth of Andy's various rants, none of which take up more than a couple of pages, it's a good book for the quick bus journey or to relax with for a few minutes while drinking your favorite beverage. show less

Lately I've been reading stories about war, an unfortunate constant of human history, I'm afraid. Tales about WWII, or "The Last Good War" (a book I read many years ago), as Studs Terkel called it, abound, but I especailly recommend this one. My War, by Andy Rooney (yep, the same bushy-eyebrowed old grump you see on 60 Minutes every week), is a true gem, full of his homespun self-deprecating bits of humor and wisdom, along with the expected grim and grisly stories about the carnage that is show more war. As to the importance of his wartime experience, Rooney says right up front, "My life was never the same again." As a young reporter (his army ID photo looks startlingly like Audie Murphy, who of course penned his own memoir, To Hell and Back) for The Stars and Stripes, Rooney got up close and personal with both the air and ground wars in Europe, and also traveled to India and China, rubbing shoulders with Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin and Walter Cronkite. One particular line from the book has stayed with me: "I laugh, bitterly, when I hear the phrase, 'He gave his life for his country.' No one gives his life. His life is taken." Rooney is a newspaperman and a reporter, but more than anything else he is a damn fine writer who simply tells it like he sees it. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy and Love, War & Polio show less

I found this one in the back of a classic thrift store, somewhat near my house. It is the last of these types of thrift stores that I came of age frequenting that I know of - the mothball smell of the old clothes, the yellowed atmosphere. In the back room where they keep all their books, board games, puzzles, old magazines, and records, this book caught my eye from the overstuffed bookshelves.

My family and I used to watch 60 Minutes ritually when I was a kid, and Andy Rooney’s rants were show more my favorite part. However, the cleverness has faded, and the text has aged rather badly. This book filled me with a kind of nostalgia when I read it, a glimpse of a world long gone (the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s). Many of his "witty" gripes have been dissolved by advancement, or the cause has disappeared altogether, or proves to be sexist or even racially insensitive.

However, there are a few must-reads here: D-Day, An Essay on War, and Savers. I would give an honorable mention to Chairs, a classic of Rooney’s curmudgeonry. I did like In Praise of New York City as well, where he said that diversity and the failure of immigrant cultures to melt into society at large, combined with the successes of integration into the same society by the same immigrants, lay at the heart of the city. Wonder what he’d say about it now? These parts that I delighted in amount to a total page count of 28 pages in a 245-page book, so take that as you will.

In the end, I really cannot recommend this book. I picked it up in a fit of 1980s nostalgia; it has aged badly save for the bits I mentioned above. Although the parts on WWII are really worth seeking out and reading, though very short. show less