Benchley is a pleasant companion, but 70 year old short pieces (were they newspaper columns?) don't make scintillating reading. I remember thinking Lewis Grizzard was pretty funny 15 years ago, but I'm sure that even after that relatively shorter period of time, it might just cause a few chuckles now. Many of the items in this book are Benchley's reactions to news items he has read, some of which were obscure in their own day and which are fairly meaningless now. But of course, with Benchley, the idea is humor, so that really shouldn't matter, I guess. The real problem is that each piece is so short that the best he can do is make a few droll remarks, and like a lot of writers, he has certain obsessions that he repeats over and over. So reading these pieces one after another just doesn't work. It took me probably 3-4 weeks off and on to get through these. The best part of the book is the last five chapters, which come from Benchley's "Untold Story". All in all, these pieces seem to have been written in a long ago, distant, more outwardly civilized world that no longer exists. ( )

let us sample, shall we? the first sentences of the piece "The Children's Hour" ... "I don't want to be an alarmist, but I think that the Younger Generation is up to something. I think that there is a plot a foot. I base my apprehension on nothing more definite than the fact that they are always coming in and going out of the house, without any apparent reason. .." If you are not already smiling to yourself with these words, without a punchline reached ... smiling in anticipation of his gentle pacing and subtle reflections ... well .. he just might not be your cup of tea. But if you do find yourself with a suddenly lighter heart and wanting to see what might happen next ... he really is your man.

This is the book that put Benchley over the top. Reprinted more often and in more ways than any other of his books. Has the most and the shortest stories from his prime. Was available at the time of the film China Seas, in which Benchley upstaged Gable to grab national attention as as comic actor, that naturally led to huge sales of his books. ( )