Calvin Trillin TOPICS: Arts / Music / Drama Humor Food Journalism Media / Broadcast / Print FEE CATEGORY:* 15.0k to 20.0k TRAVELS FROM: New York Profile Books & Videos Request This Speaker

Calvin Trillin: Books & Videos

About Alice


Epitomizing what is best in personal narrative, noted humorist Calvin Trillin expands his acclaimed New Yorker essay into an eloquent, affecting eulogy for his adored wife, Alice -- the lovable foil in his hilarious ruminations on family life. Although she played literary "straight man" to her husband's more free-spirited persona, the real-life Alice was remarkably multifaceted. Beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished, she was an educator, a writer, and a cancer survivor who, in an ironic twist of fate, succumbed in 2001 to complications from radiation treatments. That she was also the abiding love of Trillin's life shines forth incandescently from every page of this graceful, understated tribute.

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A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme


Somehow, despite everything Calvin Trillin wrote about the Bush Administration in Obliviously On He Sails, his 2004 bestseller in verse, George W. Bush is still in the White House. Taking a philosophical view, Trillin has said, “We weren’t going to know whether you could bring down a presidency with iambic pentameter until somebody tried it.”

Now Trillin is trying again, back at his pithy and hilarious best to comment on the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq (“Then terrorists could count on what we’d do: / Attack us, we’ll strike back, though not at you”), his religiosity (“He treats his critics in the press / As if they’re yapping Pekineses. / Reporters deal in mundane facts; / This man has got the word from Jesus”), and whether he was wearing a transmitting device in the first presidential debate (“Could this explain his odd expressions? Is there proof he / Was being told, ‘If you can hear me now, look goofy’?”)

Trillin deals with the people around Bush, such as Nanny Dick Cheney and Mushroom Cloud Rice and Orange John Ashcroft and Orange John’s successor, Alberto Gonzales (“The A.G.’s to be one Alberto Gonzales— / Dependable, actually loyal über alles”). He tries to predict the behavior of the famously intemperate John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations in poems with titles like “Bolton Chases French Ambassador Up Tree” and “White House Says Bolton Can Do Job Even While in Straitjacket.”

Finally, in dealing with whether the entire Bush Administration, like the unfortunate Brownie, has done a heckuva job, he composes a small-government sea chantey for the Republicans:

’Cause government’s the problem, lads,
Americans would all do well to shun it.
Yes, government’s the problem, lads.
At least it is when we’re the ones who run it.


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Family Man


Calvin Trillin begins his wise and charming ruminations on family by stating the sum total of his child-rearing advice: "Try to get one that doesn't spit up. Otherwise, you're on your own." Suspicious of any child-rearing theories beyond "Your children are either the center of your life or they're not," Trillin has clearly reveled in the role of family man. Acknowledging the special perils to the privacy of people living with a writer who occasionally remarks, "I hope you're not under the impression that what you just said was off the record," Trillin deals with the subject of family in a way that is loving, honest, and wildly funny.

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