The victory lap phase of Calvin Trillin's long career has seen the release of several collections of his output, one of which is The Lede, a smorgasbord of witty journalism about journalism. When Trillin (Jackson, 1964) was growing up in Kansas City, his father "wanted me to be the president of the United States, and his fallback position was that I not become a ward of the county." Journalism, however, was "a conceivable middle course." The goal of this compendium of pieces from 1970 to 2021 for Time, the Nation, and the New Yorker is to present "a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer."
Anyone who has read Trillin's work knows what to expect: pithy comments, sly humor, and rigorous reporting. There are humorous pieces, such as a 2021 entry on his admiration for compelling ledes--first paragraphs meant to draw in readers--a favorite of which is "Dead," James Thurber's opening for a story about a man found with a knife in his back. Others focus on noteworthy journalists such as Edna Buchanan, the legendary police reporter for the Miami Herald, and R.W. Apple Jr. of the New York Times, who was so flamboyant that "Apple stories constitute a subgenre of the journalistic anecdote." Trillin covers a half-century of journalism with his usual droll observations. A self-described "jester among the jackals of the press" skewers and praises in equal measure in this entertaining work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer