Word: rooney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...MORE also offers Rooney at his best. He presents prosaic subjects not only for their own sake--"where did [Manhattan's] Fourth Avenue go?"--but also because they serve as a foundation on which he constructs amusing and developed discussions. He hates weathermen, as he describes their typical broadcast. "There's ice on the roads today and many of the roads are slippery, listeners, so please drive carefully,'" Rooney wonders. "Does he think we're idiots? Does he think we don't know ice is slippery'" Horoscopes receive a similar treatment. "Cancer: This is a good time for those...
More important, And More presents Rooney not only as an aggravated observer but also as one who appreciates life's small pleasures. Thankfully, he gradually begins to address things that, while they may go unnoticed as glue, remain more important, interesting, and enchanting than cost hangers...
Essays like "Hot Weather" underscore Rooney's narrative skill and ability to charm. When he served in the army. Rooney couldn't sleep because of the unbearable summer heat. Late one night, he crawled undetected under the barracks until he reached the base's post exchange, where he found discarded cakes...
...Weather" ends with an observation concerning Americans' reliance upon air conditioners, but it doesn't seem pointless because Rooney first establishes an engrossing frame of reference...
...Rooney writes movingly as well. His simply entitled "Mother" begins. "My mother died today. "Like others collected in the book, this essay includes carefully selected and seemingly unimportant details. "She was girl's high jump champion of Ballston spa in 1902". But his observations and attention to the unobserved further, rather than muddle, his conclusion. "There is no time for each of us to sweep for the hole world," he writes. "We each sweep...