Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself Books
Amazon Products

 Rating: - Well worth reading, not quite up to Never Have Your Dog Stuffed
Alan Alda is an extraordinarily engaging writer, with a direct, smart, deceptively "effortless" style that reminds me of Isaac Asimov. I greatly enjoyed this book, although not quite as much as his first memoir, for the technical writing reason I describe below. I can't wait for the next one!

One caution: do not be confused by the odd Publishers Weekly review which suggests he has abandoned his lifelong political and personal philosophy. ("While poking good-natured fun at some of his earlier rhetoric (the ravings of a naïve Hollywood liberal)..."). That simply does not describe this book. I was concerned by the PW comment prior to reading the book, yet I didn't see a single sentence that suggests Alda thinks his past views were naive "ravings" (?). He notes that some protests in which he participated in the 1960s had no impact, but that's a comment on tactics, not political values.

The slight dissatisfaction I had with this book was, I think, an inevitable outcome of Alda's idea of weaving in excerpts from (mostly very good) speeches he's given -- which is, of course, the central framing conceit for this book. It's simply in the nature of things that excerpted pieces are never quite as appealing as new material. The old material, however good, always reads as "seconds." And there's just a bit of let-down each time as you have to shift gears from the natural flow of the book to the different rhythm of the excerpt, then back again.

Fortunately, the excerpts woven into this narrative are jumping-off points and comprise a relatively small percent of the words, so this is a minor dissatisfaction and not a major one. And, despite the inherent drawbacks of this approach, Alda does a superb job trying to weave in these excerpts, explaining his thinking, creative process, and anxiety in writing the speeches in a fascinating "behind the scenes" way. He is such a skilled, hard-working writer that he actually pulls this off most, but not all, of the time.

The less successful, more generic speech excerpts (for me) are near the beginning of the book. They get better as the book proceeds, perhaps because he has gotten better over time at writing attention-getting, highly unusual, thoughtful speeches.

Perhaps Alda felt he had "already written" his autobiography and had to do something really different to justify a second book. While that may seem logical, there's really no rule that an author can only write one memoir. The notion of writing a second (or even a third or fourth) autobiography never stopped Frederick Douglass, Isaac Asimov, David Niven, Laurence Olivier, or Leonard Nimoy, to name a few "multi-memoirist" authors I've enjoyed.

To go back where I started, I loved Alda's first book, loved this one almost as much, and eagerly await his next. These are lasting contributions to any home bookshelf.

Search: