The Swiss Family Perelman

2.5 stars for the text, that has dated quite a bit in references, but another half star for the splendid Hirschfeld illustrations, which have not.

A more apt title would be Around the World in 80 Shopping Sprees, since this is not a tale of being stranded, but episodes in a round the world tour, where an inordinate amount of acquisition seems to occur.

Perelman stood out among the popular American humorists if the first half of the 20th century (Benchley, Thurber, Chappell, Ford) for his vocabulary. The humor was broad and standard. A common trope was to describe himself in the most excellent terms, with the goal of conveying just the opposite image. "Under a brow purer than that of Michelanglo's David, capped by a handful of sparse and show more greasy hairs, brooded a pair of fiery orbs, glittering like zircons behind ten-cent-store spectacles." A sentence such as "Weary of pub-crawling and eager to recapture the zest of courtship, [my wife and I] stayed home to leaf over our library of bills, many of them first editions" would not have been out of place in Benchley. But only Perelman would write a sentence like "This edifying sight it should be noted, was shown us as an example of Yankee prodigality and waste; our cicerone, a Dutch subaltern, underscored it with footnotes on our dollar diplomacy and pharisaism distilled of purest snake venom." show less

Anthology of autobiographical essay accounts of a family trip around a world of Perelman's own, reprinted from "Holiday" magazine. Includes a cello, wife and two children, dementia praecox, and cartoon illustrations by Hirschfeld.