52 McGs.: The Best Obituaries from Legendary New York Times Reporter Robert McG. Thomas

Thomas never got to put these pieces into book form. He died, but a fan of his work decided that his work should live on . . . and I'm glad this was the case . . . Thomas had the gift of being able to find something worth writing about--regardless of the subject . . . my only regret is that all obituaries in loca papers aren't as interesting . .. but as long as I don't come across mine, I won't complain!

There were several memorable passages; among them:
[in an obituary about Francine Katzenbogen] Her neighbors were
not amused that she planned to house 20 cats in a converted
two-story garage she had refurbished at a cost of $100,000. The
luxurious cat complex included tile floors, climbing towers,
scratching posts, skylights and cozy, low-lying window ledges
where the cats could stretch out and watch the world outside
their air-conditioned lair.

Not content to recognize a Brooklyn accent, Mr. Berger drew
on his broader knowledge of American speech and history to
develop a theory of just how the signature "Toidy-told Street"
evolved. It was, he theorized, a result of the close commercial
connections with the pre-Civil War South in which upper-class
southern speech, primarily from New Orleans and Charleston,
SC, was imported and hammered down to a lower-class
Brooklyneese.

A man given to gross exaggeration when simple embellishment
would suffice, Mr. McCartney also claimed to have visited every

state except Hawaii: His goats couldn't swim that far, he
explained, and if they could, they'd just end up eating the grass skirts off the hula dancers anyway.


Laugh out loud funny, but always respectful   January 5, 2002
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

Bob Thomas was a fine, generous, kind man with a knack for throwing a great party. He was also one of his generation's most talented observers of modern culture via his legendary NYT obits. While his posthumous descriptions of Americans both great and small are often bitingly amusing, his respect for his subjects was always palpable. It is this combination that makes his writing so uniquely fabulous.


52 McGems   December 14, 2001
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

There are two great experiences in newspaper reading, one if the wedding announcements in the Sunday NY Times, the other is the obituary page every day. No other paper does it the way the Times does, putting a smile on my face even as a life passes before us. The greatest NYT obituary writer of all was Robert McG. Thomas; and nobody laughed louder at his witty and ironic observations than Chris Calhoun, the famous book editor at Sterling Lord who compiled this neat deck of 52 of Thomas' wryest and wittiest obituaries. From a Jewish matordor, to the guy who buried Lee Harvey Oswald to a character whose main claim to fame was that he was the guy the three stooges stuck in the eye all the time, Its uproarious. Just a couple of examples: In an obituary of a guy who discovered a stone age tribe in the Philipines, Thomas ponders whether they were really primitives or it was all a hoax. Either way, he writes, "It was a reflection of their rapid acculturalization that in 1988 several members of the tribe filed a libel suit against anthropologists who called them fakers." That one cracked me up. So did the one about a woman who won a lottery. The real story was she loved cats and spent all her money on cats; but they she died because she was allerigic to them. Well, it was funny to me. Then there is one about a famous genealogist who ended up disproving his wife's claime to be a descendant of one of the founding fathers. That one ends with a quote from a son saying he has not interst in the topic noting, " We were victimes of genealogical overkill."

Like the subjects of the obits, this is all subtle. These are not obits of famous people, most had brushes with greatness like the skit on the Letterman show. They lucked into an invention or found a famous golf ball or became a whiz at duckpins. My only regret is that there weren't more of them. 93 McGs would have had a better ring to it. The book ends with the obituary of Thomas himself, who died in 2000 at the age of 60. It is unfortunate that the editor didn't include all of the obituaries mentioned in his obituary, since it would be natural that you want to go back and look at them after they were mentioned. But picking 52 out of a collection of nearly 700 is a tough task and Calhoun had to draw the line somewhere. and that is a minor quibble. I found myself reading them all out loud to my wife and daughter, who enjoyed them every bit as much as I did.


Obit writing at its best   December 5, 2001
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

For many years I clipped Robert McG Thomas's obits. I cannot remember a mediocre one. He had the rare ability to capture the essence of each person he wrote about. I miss his obits. This is a fine book.