Friends Talking in the Night: Sixty Years of Writing for The New Yorker

US: Knopf, 1999. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. From a writer of astonishing versatility, this wonderfully rich collection of pieces is both a memoir of Philip Hamburger's writing life and a vivid a nd various record of the world he has lived in. Hamburger first went to wor k for The New Yorker in 1939, under the aegis of Harold Ross, and he is sti ll there--six decades and four editors later. He has wandered all over its pages as Our Man Stanley or Reporter at Large, doing Talk of the Town, Casu als, and Notes & Comment, writing Profiles, and more. And he has wandered a ll over the map, unearthing the secret souls of some fifty-five American to wns and cities (from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Butte, Montana) and bearing witness to the horrors of war and fascism (from Mussolini's bloody corpse h anging upside down in a Milan public square, to the hungry, hollow-eyed mar chers bearing pro-Tito posters through the wrecked streets of Belgrade afte r the war). An old-fashioned liberal--and proud of it-- Hamburger has witnessed almost every inauguration since 1933 (at Roosevelt's first he was perched on the i cy branch of a tree), has spied shamelessly on a succession of New York Cit y mayors (he used to live conveniently across from Gracie Mansion), and has constantly championed the voices of liberty (Judge Learned Hand, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Judge William Henry Hastie, Edward R. Murrow). Insatiably curious, Hamburger strikes for the heart of whatever subject he approaches--whether it's the famous (Truman, Toscanini, Evita Perón, Eleanor Roose.