Andrew A. RooneyBesprekingen

Any Rooney's My War was a short memoir which focuses on Andy Rooney's time in the Army in World War II, where he was assigned to Stars and Stripes. A Short read including the afterword 278 pages. A nice 3.5 star read of time in Europe the events he was part of D-Day, the Liberation of Paris, the crossing at Remagen and his entry into a concentration camp.

A personal account which appears very truthful and honest if his journey including both his successes and perceived failures and the paths of some of the other great deployed journalist of the day. I would not place this at the top of the pile but a worthy addition to the literature to an observer of World War II from England to the end of the war.

Good account of war days of an army reporter. Some editorializing about war and people. Worthwhile.

My War is a blunt, funny, idiosyncratic account of Andy Rooney’s World War II. As a young, naïve correspondent for The Stars and Stripes, Rooney flew bomber missions, arrived in France during the D-Day invasion, crossed the Rhine with the Allied forces, traveled to Paris for the Liberation, and was one of the first reporters into Buchenwald. Like so many of his generation, Rooney’s life was changed forever by the war. He saw life at the extremes of human experience, and wrote about what he observed, making it real to millions of men and women. My War is the story of an inexperienced kid learning the craft of journalism. It is by turns moving, suspenseful, and reflective. And Rooney’s unmistakable voice shines through on every page.

I borrowed it from the public library. If you know Andy Rooney from his segments on 60 Minutes, then you know what you are getting with this book.

See my blog note about the book:

[http://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2007/04/booknote-out-of-my-mind.html]

Pretty compelling, although could have used a better copy editor.

Wit and cantakerous wisdom from one of America's best commentators. Non of these articles were in his later compilations. One needs to have lived in the 1980's to appreciate it.

Compilation of observations from all of Rooney's previous works.

You have to like his snarky, crotchety style to really enjoy this book. He relates an event where, as a member of a 155mm howitzer load crew during training in England, he disobeys orders from the artillery officer. He deliberately loads incorrect numbers of powder charges into the breech to ensure that the shell misses it's target. Thus, the gun crew's inaccurate performace would reflect poorly on the officer he did't like and somehow damage this officer's reputation with the command staff. Andy seemed to find this incident humorous and crowed about it for a bit. As a veteran, I found this to be unconscionable especially under war time conditions. Nothing remotely amusing about it at all. This really jaundiced the rest of the book for me.

His experiences were real, many dangerous but his opinionated writing style wore me down. I couldn't wait to close the cover.

A few minutes with Andy Rooney, by Andy Rooney
Loved watching and listening to this reporter on TV sunday nights. So many things that make you say 'hmmm' I've always wondered about that.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).½

The wit of this man is very entertaining. He turns simple subjects into truly retrospective essays.

Andy Rooney was a Sergeant during World War II. He was detailed to the military newspaper, The Stars and Stripes. He reported from England, France and Germany. At the end of the war he spent a short time reporting from India and Burma. He reported the events when our forces captured the bridge at Remagen and crossed the Rhine. I enjoyed reading his impressions of Ernest Hemingway, other reporters and some of the high ranking United States officers. He often comments on how people he met during the war made their livings afterwards.

There's a television programme here in America called '60 Minutes' which, as you might have guessed, is sixty minutes long. Except it isn't. For if one removes the time spent on commercials then it's probably between 45-50 minutes in length but I'm assuming a tv show with the title '45-50mins Once the Commercials Are Taken Out' is just a little too out there. About once a month, nowadays at least, the last couple of minutes are taken up by an old time radio and television writer named Andy Rooney who is as famous for his eyebrows as he is for his journalism. In those two minutes Andy will rant about any given topic of his choosing and the book 'Years of Minutes' is a collection of his rants from 1982-2003 inclusive.
Mr Rooney seems to polarize people in their opinions as it appears a lot of people can't stand him and others think he's great. I happen to fall into the latter category and so it will come as no surprise to you that I loved this book. The only problem I had with it was that it only went up to 2003. Of course, it was published in 2003 so it's not as if they could have added the more recent years but I was just saying is all!
There aren't really any chapters in this book but each section of rants is broken down into the year they took place and the year takes the place of the chapter. Maybe that means there are chapters after all just in the guise of years but bear with me as I'm doing my best here. Each chapter year contains several subtitles describing the rants that appeared during that particular tv season. For instance during the 2002 season he grumbled about libraries and here's a few snippets of what he had to say:

"...silence in a library ought to be abandoned...silence can be more obtrusive than noise because you strain to hear the words of every whisper but you're oblivious to a yell or a shout."

"There are too many blank pages at the beginning and end of most books [with] authors taking up a whole page to say something like TO MY WIFE GRETCHEN WITHOUT WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT THIS BOOK COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN. Why should we waste our time while the author tries to get in good with his wife? If you took all the useless pages out of all the books in a library, they'd save miles of shelf space."

"Dust jackets are a pain in the neck and do not prevent books getting dusty."

Those type of comments are exactly the type of reading you get in this book on subjects from catalogues to cold remedies, from ghostwriters ("General Colin Powell...signed a book contract for $6million...[he] is going to have a ghostwriter...for $6million don't you think he ought to write the book himself?") to football uniforms.
For book lovers there are plenty of book related topics such as those already mentioned as well as many others including cookbooks, school books, magazine page numbers and also dictionaries. He even has a diatribe about his eyebrows!
All in all I found this to be a very entertaining read and with over 500 pages worth of Andy's various rants, none of which take up more than a couple of pages, it's a good book for the quick bus journey or to relax with for a few minutes while drinking your favorite beverage.

Eh. Rooney rants on several topics, including whether July should be abbreviated Jul.

War as only Andy Rooney can tell it.

I agree with Andy Rooney.
This collection of essays is almost 30 years old, but Andy is still right on about the state of the world both as it is and as it was. With the exception of Hot Weather (he hates it, I thrive in it), Andy and I are kindred spirits. I guess that makes me a 'curmudgeon,' as I have often heard Rooney referred to. If the wisdom, intelligence, and the courage to say something about it that this book imparts make a curmudgeon, then we should all aspire to the moniker.

Lately I've been reading stories about war, an unfortunate constant of human history, I'm afraid. Tales about WWII, or "The Last Good War" (a book I read many years ago), as Studs Terkel called it, abound, but I especailly recommend this one. My War, by Andy Rooney (yep, the same bushy-eyebrowed old grump you see on 60 Minutes every week), is a true gem, full of his homespun self-deprecating bits of humor and wisdom, along with the expected grim and grisly stories about the carnage that is war. As to the importance of his wartime experience, Rooney says right up front, "My life was never the same again." As a young reporter (his army ID photo looks startlingly like Audie Murphy, who of course penned his own memoir, To Hell and Back) for The Stars and Stripes, Rooney got up close and personal with both the air and ground wars in Europe, and also traveled to India and China, rubbing shoulders with Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin and Walter Cronkite. One particular line from the book has stayed with me: "I laugh, bitterly, when I hear the phrase, 'He gave his life for his country.' No one gives his life. His life is taken." Rooney is a newspaperman and a reporter, but more than anything else he is a damn fine writer who simply tells it like he sees it. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy and Love, War & Polio

2823 My War, by Andy Rooney (read 14 Jan 1996) This was a most satisfying read. I have long enjoyed his five minutes on 60 Minutes, but never thought I would read a book by him. He was drafted in 1941 . His big break came when he was assigned to the Stars and Stripes, an Army newspaper. He actually went on a couple of bombing raids over Europe, and arrived in France a few days after D-Day. His story is unfailingly interesting. He has nothing good to say for General Patton. This is just a great book, moving, serious, funny, just exceptionally well-written. Though he had a safer war than many, he took risks and certainly is admirable.

A collection of the broadcasts of Andy Rooney.

I like Andy Rooney and found this interesting. Great 3rd person, objective view of the war.

Rated: B-