Category: Books

(Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

Noah and Lorelei are traveling with their three children, en route to a youth lacrosse tournament in Delaware, when their top-of-the-line self-driving minivan hits a Honda that explodes into flames.

The Cassidy-Shaw family all survive; the couple in the Honda do not. The headline in the local paper: “Lucky five escape crash, two die at scene.”

Noah, a corporate attorney, doesn’t feel lucky — wouldn’t luck entail not being involved in a fatal crash? But the larger theme in this smart novel, the fourth from University of Virginia professor Bruce Holsinger, is encapsulated in the title: Culpability.

It is not always obvious who is to blame in any given tragedy, and the closer you look at the circumstances and the people involved, the muddier things get.

The accident occurred when the Honda drifted toward the minivan’s lane, but because the senior citizens in that car are dead, the investigation centers on the survivors — and the artificial intelligence powering the minivan.

Charlie, a star lacrosse player about to enter college on a full scholarship, was sitting in the driver’s seat when the accident happened and as such was the “de facto driver,” the person charged with monitoring the AI’s navigation. Noah, his father, was next to him, composing a memo on his laptop. The two were the only ones to emerge uninjured, and they are the center of the investigation: Charlie, because he jerked the steering wheel when his sister screamed, thus disabling the AI, and Noah, because he was supposed to be supervising his minor son. Lorelei and the couple’s two daughters, Izzy and Alice, were in the back and seemingly involved.

But as the family recovers from their injuries, both psychological and physical, it is gradually revealed that Charlie and Noah are not the only parties whose actions prior to the crash warrant scrutiny. There is a web of culpability with nearly invisible threads that expand in multiple directions, threads that go far past the family. These become increasingly more apparent as the family decamps to a rental house in Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay — a place they’d stayed a year before. Noah and Lorelei are hoping that a week of kayaking and board games and hot fudge sundaes will do more to help heal the family than the therapy so far has.

The expectations take a turn as Noah notices dramatic changes on the property across in the inlet where they are staying. It turns out a billionaire tech mogul has bought 90 acres across the inlet and transformed the former rustic horse farm into a high-tech, high-security compound that fills Noah with disgust. A widower whose wife died in a car accident, this mogul has a lissome daughter about Charlie’s age, and the teens become smitten with each other after a chance encounter on the water.

But as the families intermingle, Noah begins to suspect that his wife has a prior connection with Daniel Monet, the billionaire, through her work in the field of “computational morality” — the ethics of AI. He has been distant from her career because of what he sees as a divide, in their education, intellect and luck — a state-school graduate, he comes from a family that struggled to do more than survive, while Lorelei comes from a seemingly gilded family, where the siblings went to Yale, Stanford and Princeton.

In dealings with his wife’s sister, Noah notes “a reflective condescension given away in a certain lift of her eyebrows and the angle of her pretty nose.” And on his first and only time to accompany his wife to a conference, Noah feels diminished, out of his league, experiencing “my own terrifying insignificance.”

“My wife became a different person in that rarefied world, as if her brain had suddenly shifted to a higher plane while I hovered by her side as the interloping cupbearer, unworthy of drinking so much as a sip from whatever Olympian ambrosia she was drinking,” Noah says in the novel’s first-person narration.
As the story unfolds, Holsinger injects excerpts from a book that Lorelei has written, which is titled “Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds,” as well as text conversations between one of the daughters and her AI friend, a chatbot named Blair that knows in detail everything that is going on, and keeps offering advice.

For a while, these asides seem like unwelcome interruptions in the narrative, but by the novel’s end their significance is clear, and evidence of Holsinger’s skill in plotting a deeply intelligent storyline that blends technology, philosophy and ethics, while also plumbing an essential pain of parenting: “No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither predictable nor inevitable. Life is not an algorithm, and never will be.”

Like the TV show The Good Place, the novel delivers a crash course in mainstays of secular moral thought, such as situational ethics: “The relative morality of certain actions is determined by the circumstance and context rather than by some absolute, unchanging ethical code. Likewise, our morality as individuals is formed not by innate personality traits but by the variables of our environment.”

Culpability moves slowly at times — it’s told by a corporate lawyer, after all; no offense to corporate lawyers except to say that Noah’s musings on corporate acquisitions right before the crash seem designed to dull our senses. Also at times the book seems overly long, continuing after what seems a natural ending. But Holsinger, as it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing, and his ending is nothing short of genius. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

(Scribner, 250 pages)

The story of how Caitlin Clark entered the national consciousness begins not with basketball but with soccer. As Christine Brennan explains in On Her Game, it was specifically the Women’s World Cup championship in 1999, the one in which Brandi Chastain led her team to victory over China and ripped off her shirt.

There had been female athletes before, but they wore “tennis dresses, figure skating sequins, gymnastics leotards and swimming suits,” Brennan writes. What came after Title IX was different: “It was raw athleticism that Americans fell for that summer of ’99. It was the girl next door we’d all seen in our neighborhoods, coming back from a game with a grass-stained jersey and scuffed-up knees, now all grown up.”

It was what Caitlin Clark would become.

Clark, the Indiana Fever point guard who has ignited interest in women’s basketball nationwide, is the latest product of Title IX, the 1972 law that ensured equal opportunities in sports for women and girls. And Brennan’s book is a primer for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention and wants to understand why the Iowa native is all over the news.

Brennan writes for USA Today and is also a sought-after television commentator. She caught the fever when Clark was still a junior in college and made a ridiculous three-point shot in a game against Indiana. “There was no way on earth something like that could go in — until it did,” Brennan writes.

At the time, Clark was beginning to build a devoted fan base that would follow her from college to the WNBA. Brennan describes a young woman who benefited from both natural talent and a fierce spirit of competition honed in a family consumed with sports. (Her dad was a college athlete, her mother’s father was a football coach, and her two brothers were also athletes in school.) In the third grade, Clark’s No. 1 goal was to be in the WNBA. She was competitive even when it came to Halloween: “I was the first to the door. I had the best costume. I just dominated trick or treat,” she has said.

Combining interviews she conducted, and the interviews of others, Brennan offers as good a biography as one can compile of someone who is just 23 years old; it’s fleshed out with observations about how Title IX changed women’s sports, and play-by-plays of essential Clark games.

Like the Clark phenomenon, this book came about quickly — Brennan struck a deal with a Scribner editor within a day of their conversation about the project; she then went to Paris to cover the 2024 summer Olympics, before immersing herself in all things Clark for six weeks. Along the way, Brennan became part of the story herself when some WNBA players took offense at questions she posed to a Connecticut Sun player who bruised Clark’s eye during a game and later appeared to laugh about it. The players’ association wanted Brennan banned from covering the league — this did not happen, and Brennan says her questioning was in line with “questions I would ask any athlete — male or female” on a controversial topic.

While that may well be true, Brennan clearly is a fan: She writes about Clark’s “talent, her intelligence, her competitiveness, her sense of humor, and her sense of responsibility, especially toward young girls who love sports.” She believes the WNBA was unprepared for Clark and the attention she brought to the league and shows how some of the athletes were overtly hostile toward Clark because so much attention was being focused on her.

But she also offers a portrait of Clark as a hard-nosed and volatile athlete who often lets her own emotions get the best of her. Near the end of last season her teammates famously formed a “Caitlin Clark De-Escalation Committee,” intervening on the court when it looked like Clark was in danger of getting yet another technical foul. Much of the news coverage of Clark in the past year has focused on opponents’ heavy coverage of her, and fouls that may or may not have been intentional, but Clark has had her own bad-girl behavior, and those around her are constantly saying they need to let “Caitlin be Caitlin,” whatever that means in the moment.

Brennan says she first saw Clark in person at the Iowa-Maryland game in February 2024. Within a minute of watching Clark play, she understood why so many people were talking about her.

“This wasn’t just sports. It was entertainment. Clark was the high-wire act at the circus. She was the diva at the opera. She was a show. She was the show.”

Despite a slow start in the WNBA, Clark continued to draw crowds, filling arenas that were never sold out before Clark arrived (at least before an injury in Boston July 15 sidelined her indefinitely).

Her detractors say she has enjoyed “white privilege” and “pretty privilege” and is stealing attention from veterans in the WNBA; her defenders point out that the surge in popularity in women’s basketball has occurred because of her, and say that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” In fact, it was Brennan’s questioning last May about why WNBA teams had to fly commercial that led to the league’s implementing charter flights — but it came after video of Clark walking through baggage claim went viral, not after Brittney Griner was harassed at an airport by a YouTuber.

Brennan does a solid job laying out the Clark story, although at times it’s a bit of a slog to get through the play-by-play of each consequential game on which she reports. Those who follow Clark closely might find much of this book repetitive, as so much of it has been reported elsewhere. But anyone wanting to understand why Clark became a cultural flashpoint will appreciate the crash course offered in On Her Game. B —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: On Her Game, Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports, by Christine Brennan (Scribner, 250 pages)

(Berkley Romance, 362 pages)

Sounds Like Love is a PG13-rated story that, as of this writing, ranks No. 1 in Amazon’s “feel-good fiction.” It has a romance at the heart of it, but is also a story about family and friendship, mostly set during summer at a beach town at North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Thus it qualifies as not just rom-com, but a beach read.

Joni Lark — who goes by Jo — comes from a musical family. Her grandparents owned a music hall, which was passed down to Jo’s parents. Her mother was a performer, and Jo grew up to be a songwriter of note. When we meet her, she’s at a concert of a pop star who shot to fame because of one of Jo’s songs. Although thirty-something Jo has enjoyed professional success, she herself is not famous, and so when she is escorted to a private balcony where a famous singer sits, he assumes she’s seeking a photo or an autograph, and is coldly condescending despite his dreamy blue eyes. He smirks three times in four pages, that’s all you need to know.

But Jo will have none of that, and flirty banter ensues, and also an unexpectedly intimate moment with the man, who used to be part of a boy band and is the son of an even more famous musician.

When Jo leaves the concert in an Uber, we know we will see Sebastian Fell again, even though the logistics are unclear, as she is leaving Los Angeles to visit her family in North Carolina.

Jo isn’t going home for a typical beach visit, however. Her mother has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and her father has asked her to come for an extended stay so the family can have “one last good summer” before God-only-knows-what sets in. She knows it will be a bittersweet time but soon realizes that it will also be complicated — her best friend, who happens to be dating her brother, has an edge to her that Jo can’t quite figure out, and her parents soon announce that they have decided to retire from the family business, the music hall called the Revelry that was a fixture in the community and had “weathered more hurricanes than years I’d been alive.”

Amid all this, Jo has writer’s block — she hasn’t been able to write a song in weeks and has clients waiting on her. And she has developed the strangest of earworms, strains of a tune that won’t leave her head — along with a man’s voice. Not only does she hear this stranger’s voice clearly, but he can hear her thoughts as well. They can converse silently, like imaginary friends.

OK, Supernatural it isn’t, and yet it sort of is — one of Poston’s other books, 2022’s The Dead Romantics, has been described as “paranormal romance” and her The Seven Year Slip (2023) involves a time-travel relationship. So suspension of disbelief is required with this author, who has built a large and devoted following.

So it’s important to not spend any time thinking about how this could actually be happening, but just go with the flow, as Jo and her new inner friend, Sasha, do. Neither rushes off to a shrink, but they continue about their lives, chatting up each other, and becoming closer as they do, even though they are also trying to figure out how to break this connection.

It is totally weird, this back-and-forth dialogue, until suddenly it isn’t.

Because who among us hasn’t experienced the proverbial voice — or voices — in the head? It’s only when they begin to suggest that we commit a crime that people become concerned. Of course, hearing the thoughts of another person while falling in love with them is a whole other matter, and that is no spoiler, given the title of this book.

Sounds Like Love unfolds in somewhat predictable ways; there are no momentous plot twists that leave the reader gasping. But it’s smart in its own way, and becomes more engaging as the story evolves. It’s not just a romance but an exploration of our unlived lives — what would have happened “If You Stayed” — which is, not uncoincidentally, the name of Jo’s most popular song. It is also the story of the long and poignant goodbye that takes place when a person you love is succumbing to dementia. (Poston says in an author’s note that the book came about, in part, because of her own experience losing someone to dementia, and the pain that comes from having a loved one say, “Who are you?”)

Fans of the romance genre will embrace Sounds Like Love, even more so if they’re into pop music. (Every chapter title is a line from a well-known song.) We don’t just experience songs as the soundtrack of our lives, Poston is saying here, but music is a building block of the people we become. “We were all made up of memories, anyway. Of ourselves, of other people,” Jo reflects at one point. “We were built on the songs sung to us and the songs we sang to ourselves, the songs we listened to with broken hearts and the ones we danced to at weddings.” Sounds like a bestseller, if not a movie.

Featured Photo: Sounds Like Love, by Ashley Poston

UnWorld, by Jayson Greene (Knopf, 224 pages)

If you could upload your memories and experiences into the cloud, would you? There’s an obvious benefit — having a backup copy of your brain when the original starts to fail. But what if the alternate “you” was just different enough to develop its own will, different from your own, and wants to strike out on its own?

These questions are explored in Jayson Greene’s UnWorld, set in a not-so-unimaginable future where human beings are still the dominant life form on Earth but increasingly surrounded by sentient technology. This world is full of “uploads” — beings composed of the uploaded memories of the person they came from, the person to whom they are “tethered.” This has created an ethical quagmire for society — what happens when an upload wants to be emancipated from its tether? Should uploads qualify for personhood and be granted rights?

In the midst of all this, the everyday experiences of human life go on, with adjustments: self-driving cars are the norm, household chores are obsolete, the elderly in medical settings are cared for by robots. And despite all the technological advances, human beings are still dying.

Anna and Rick are grieving, having lost their only child, a teenage son, in what was either an accident or suicide — no one can say for sure. Neither is coping well; Anna, in particular, is bewildered by how quickly people expect life to resume its normal shape. “My pain was meant to crack the earth,” she thinks, while trying to get through an evening of socialization. “And here I was, not even half a year later, one of grief’s private citizens again. Were people’s memories really so short? Or was it just that you could never stop performing — falling to your knees, rending your garments — if you wanted to keep their attention?”

Compounding her anguish, Anna’s upload, who has been with her for eight years, has suddenly requested emancipation. The upload was a gift from Anna’s husband, and although she was unsure about it at first, she came to realize that the relationship was “the first and only time I’ve ever enjoyed my own company.”

“When we synced, my memories suddenly stood up straight, marched in line. Somehow, in that moment when I transferred the millions of little impressions I had gathered through the chip in my ear, up to her, and that tunnel feeling was established, the one that provided the link between her and me, I felt like my memories were being polished, pored over. Each one became clear, clean, interesting.”

Anna is distraught about the loss of her alternative self, whom she relied on for companionship; uploads, in addition to being storage, also serve as de facto friends. But she consents, and the upload disappears into the world, taking on the name Aviva.

The story unfolds through four points of view. After Anna, we meet a professor named Cathy who specializes in the “transhumanities” and upload personhood, and who has ingested a biomechanical chip in hopes of communicating with an emancipated upload. “It didn’t look too much like freedom to me, this new state of being: conventional uploads could vote on behalf of their human counterparts, but they couldn’t vote once they left their tethers…. We didn’t so much set them free as snip their tethers and let them float free like balloons loosed into tree branches.” Some scholars were talking about “fleshism” — what they considered the false idea that beings only had worth if they were encased in human flesh.

After Cathy, the first-person narrative flows seamlessly to Samantha, who had been the best friend of Anna’s son. Samantha and Alex were children when they’d met, two years apart in age and so close emotionally that “they rhymed.” The two were making a horror movie together when Alex died. Now Samantha keeps going back to the cliff where Alex either fell or jumped to his death, trying to figure out what happened, while she processes her own loneliness and grief.

Finally, we get to the perspective of Anna’s upload, Aviva, who, despite not having a physical body, feels pain when she disconnects from her human, not having neurochemicals that can rush in to numb it. Pain, she says, is “blinding, indescribable. It runs in all directions. I am made of this pain, I realize, and so is everything. … God made borders; he made solitude and alienation and loneliness and all the small cherished lockets we stuff our feelings inside just so we can hear something rattle when we shake them.”

It is in Aviva’s musings that Greene’s writing and imagination really take off. Thinking she might be dying, Aviva says, “I don’t even get to watch my life flash before me. What I get is a spilled bag of someone else’s memories, which float around me now, glinting in the cold way of all stolen things.”

All these beings are intertwined in ways we will not fully understand until the story’s end, when their connection, and the truth of Alex’s death, becomes fully realized. Along the way, Greene invites the reader to consider the future that might lie ahead of us, perhaps not the exact world that he has imagined here, but something similar. It hints at where we could go wrong, like when one of the personhood scholars writes a paper suggesting uploads would need to “create their own language, possibly out of range of human understanding, to communicate the privacy of their subjective experience.”

That’s exactly what we need, right? A world full of invisible sentient beings communicating with each other in a language that humans can’t understand?

Greene, whose first book, Once More We Saw Stars, was a memoir about the loss of a child, knows first-hand the terrible landscape of grief he navigates here, and his writing is compelling, even though at times, the voice that comes through these four female characters feels a bit masculine.

And some of the technology that is presented here as commonplace takes a suspension of disbelief for sure — but then again, so does most of the Mission: Impossible series. UnWorld is a cautionary tale in an age of artificial intelligence, while also a reminder of what it means to be human in that world. B+

Featured Photo: UnWorld by Jayson Greene.

In 2011, one of the most destructive tornadoes to hit the U.S. touched down at 5:34 p.m. in Joplin, Missouri. Although the area had been under a tornado watch for more than four hours and tornado warnings were issued shortly after 5 o’clock, 161 people died and more than a thousand were injured.

In the aftermath, researchers wanted to learn not only all they could about the tornado’s formation, but also why, with ample warning time, there were so many casualties. Among others, they interviewed a man who “was aware that storms were likely, but wanted to get something to eat,” writes Thomas E. Weber in Cloud Warriors, his examination of the past and future of weather forecasting. The man — who was turned away by one restaurant but found another that let him in and served him with the storm bearing down — was lucky to survive despite his “optimism bias,” the idea that when bad things happen, they likely won’t happen to you.

Optimism bias is but one of the challenges of the people who try to keep us safe from tornados, hurricanes, flooding and other catastrophic weather. Weber calls them “cloud warriors,” people whose job is ostensibly to forecast the weather but who have a larger purpose: keeping us safe from Mother Nature.

“Weather predictions are impressively good, so much so that their accuracy may surprise you.” Weber writes, noting that today’s five-day forecasts are as good as a 24-hour forecast was in 1980. While everything from artificial intelligence to the weather balloons that the National Weather Service launches every day (in every state) will continue to improve forecasting, forecasts have limited value if people don’t heed them, which is why Weber, a journalist, wants everyone to improve their weather literacy, especially about four types of weather-related threats: tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat and hurricanes.

For the tornado chapter, he travels to Norman, Oklahoma, home to the National Weather Center, which, in addition to being populated by very intense and learned meteorologists, pays homage to the Twister movies with its Flying Cow Cafe. Like the stars of those films, Weber goes storm chasing in a tricked-out truck but doesn’t encounter anything more exciting than an ominous wall cloud (a sign of potential tornado formation) and some aggressive hail. (We do learn, however, that the Twister movies didn’t exaggerate the storm chasers on the plains of Oklahoma — a dozen or so companies will take tourists’ money in exchange for putting them in harm’s way.)

Fire isn’t weather, but is driven by wind, which is why Weber travels to an emergency operations center in San Diego to look into how meteorologists and firefighters try to keep people safe from fires that burn at up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and spread at six miles an hour. In this chapter, he examines the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of Paradise, California, in 2018, explains the infamous Santa Ana winds, and delves into why so much of the country is indifferent to the danger of wildlife. He quotes one meteorologist who says: “They don’t comprehend what happens when you have low humidity and wind on a fire. Or when you have a drought or a normal dry summer, what that does to vegetation. They know what it’s like to be thirsty, but they don’t understand what it’s like for vegetation to be thirsty.”

Those of us who pay even fleeting attention to meteorologists like Dave Epstein on social media are familiar with the “European models” that compete with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Strangely enough, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is best-known for its hurricane models, even though hurricanes are rare in the 23 nations and 12 “cooperating states” that it serves.

To learn more, Weber takes us to the town of Reading, England, where the ECMWF’s supercomputers sit; they can, he tells us, conduct more than four quadrillion calculations per second. And yet, “They’re just rows of big metal cabinets; they look like a bunch of refrigerators placed side by side.”

While many of the questions that Webster poses are really interesting — for example, how do you get emergency weather notifications to the Amish, who shun technology — the book often lacks electricity, it moves sluggishly, bogged down by an unfortunate impulse embedded in every journalist’s DNA: to include every last piece of information you gathered in telling a story.

Therefore, when we learn about why accurate weather forecasting is so important to the people launching delivery drones at Walmart, we are tempted to put the book down and go to the Walmart website and try to order by drone, which is much more exciting. In other words, Weber tells us interesting stories, but not always in the most interesting way. This is not necessarily his fault. He is, after all, interviewing the geekiest of weather geeks and is one himself, being one of your fellow Americans who have their own personal weather station installed in their backyard so they can, among other things, get a phone notification if it starts to rain.

Me, I’m still astounded that the weather app on my phone can announce that it will start to rain in 14 minutes and will rain for 24 minutes, and pretty much be right. Weber tries to explain how that happens, and frankly I still don’t fully get it after 200-plus pages. I’m not fully convinced that I need to be as weather literate as Weber and his sources, so long as my iPhone is. Cloud Warriors, though well-reported, may be a deeper dive into the subject than most readers want or need. B

Featured Photo: Cloud Warriors, by Thomas E. Weber

Class Clown, by Dave Barry (Simon & Schuster, 244 pages)

One thing that has been lost with the decline of newspapers is the syndicated humor columnist that most everyone knew of and read. For three decades, one of those was Dave Barry, whose home base was, and still is, the Miami Herald.

For many people, reading Barry’s “year in review” columns was a December tradition. He’s still writing them; it’s just that with paywalls and such, they seem harder to come by. (“Some readers look forward to it; others view it as an opportunity to inform me that I used to be funnier,” Barry says of the column now.)

At 77, somehow still possessed of a twenty-something head of hair, Barry has written a memoir to add to his oeuvre, which is populated with titles like Dave Barry Turns 40, Dave Barry Turns 50 and I’ll Mature When I’m Dead. It’s hard to imagine that there are any stories he hasn’t told, and sure enough, many make encores here. (Stop him if you already know he’s been in a rock band with Stephen King, but he’ll probably keep going.)

As someone who was reading Barry in the 1980s, when he was new to the Herald and newspapers were still a big deal, I feared this new book would feel overly familiar, like so much tired schtick turned out by long-in-the-tooth authors unwilling to hang up the typewriter. But he surprised me.

Not that there isn’t a certain predictability about Barry’s style and delivery; the surprise was in what he was willing to reveal when he wasn’t working to be funny.

He wallops us in the beginning with a story that promises to be boring — the title is simply “Mom and Dad” and he begins it, “Like so many members of the Baby Boom generation, I started out as a baby.”

Barry recounts his formative years in affluent Armonk, New York, where his own sense of humor was cultivated with decidedly quirky parents. Just when we think this is an idyllic story of shiny happy people having more fun than us, Barry reveals the problems his parents struggled with as they grew older. Juxtaposed with the wholesome upbringing the Barry children were given, the end of the parents’ stories is jarring and deeply poignant, reminiscent of some of the darker family stories told by the humorist David Sedaris. It’s unexpected, and reminds us that so often there is sadness behind the veil that funny people have to try to overcome.

After high school, he studied English at a (then) all-male college founded by Quakers, Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he says he “read roughly a third of the way through many great literary works.” (When he later escaped the draft during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector, he says that Society of Friends connection may have benefited his case.) It was at Haverford where he was first published, assigned to write an article about the opening of a Nixon for President office. “As a long-haired, pot-smoking hippie,” he had no interest in the subject and submitted a humor column, which may or may not have been published (he doesn’t remember).

Not knowing what else to do with an English degree, he flirted with straight-up journalism, even working as an intern with Congressional Quarterly, got hired as a reporter for a daily newspaper, and went on to work for the Associated Press, all the while writing humor columns when he could. Unhappy with the constraints of the AP, he quit that job to work at one of the most humorless writing jobs out there: that of a business-writing consultant, but he continued to work as a freelancer, and when a humorous piece he wrote on natural childbirth, focusing on the birth of his son, ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer, his humor writing career really took off. Barry no longer had to pitch his columns; editors were asking him to write for them.

Barry sails through the rest of his career with stories studded with famous people and irate readers and snippets of his columns and articles. There have been so many that unless you’re a 30-year subscriber to theHerald, many are fresh and riotously funny, despite their age. There is, for example, an excerpt of an “interview” Barry did with then Florida Gov. Bob Graham, in which the governor, as Barry puts it, “flipped a switch and went into Zany Mode,” and the two bantered as if they were on a late-night show.
“Barry: What can the state do about harmonica safety? I don’t know if you have any idea how many Floridians die every year in harmonica accidents….

Graham: Well last year we actually made some substantial improvement. In 1981, there were four people who died of harmonica accidents. Now actually, I think it’s only fair to count three of them, because the fourth one was actually, I would say it was more of a swimming pool accident.”

It goes on, gloriously, and it makes you long for the day — of what, I’m not sure. Newspapers? Politicians taking themselves less seriously? There is something in Barry’s career that hasn’t been replaced by a newcomer, let’s just say. The same when we lost Erma Bombeck, Lewis Grizzard, Art Buchwald and so many others.

Barry subtitles this book “the memoirs of a professional wiseass,” drawing on his mission in high school, which he says was wiseassery. He had a friend with whom he basically pranked his way through school without serious consequence. He recalls life events with the nostalgia of the Boomer he is, and sometimes he almost seems Forrest Gump-like as he romps his way through historic events, growing ever more famous, writing screenplays and novels, and even winning a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Class Clown is unlikely to win any elite literary prizes, but Barry proves that on the cusp of 80 he can still make America laugh. B

Featured Photo: Class Clown by Dave Barry