Word: trillins
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...Trillin relates his Army story as humorous counterpoint to his deadpan account of a violent peace demonstration that took place just outside Fort Dix, N.J., on Armed Forces Day 1970. Between the public relations game of a peacetime Army and the pitched battles of war-sick civilians, a decade of change is neatly revealed. Nothing cosmic, only a clear, courteous reminder of how much things have changed...
Throughout U.S. Journal, a collection of Trillin's New Yorker pieces, the author reportedly lands like a benign ordering presence-deus ex-machine gunner-amidst chaos, humbug and hoopla. Covering a great deal of ground, he is naturally sympathetic toward other traveling men. He writes about a Dow Chemical recruiter who in 1968 had to go from campus to campus, removing his shoes to step over antiwar demonstrators, and try to answer such polite undergraduate questions as, "I was wondering if a Dow employee could be prosecuted as a war criminal ten or 15 years from now?" Elsewhere, Trillin...
...Orleans, Trillin probes anti-Semitism at the Mardi Gras, an event which, he also notes, is the homosexual's Harvard-Yale game. In Arkansas, he looks into aging Gerald L.K.. Smith's religious real-estate schemes that include an Oberammergau in the Ozarks. In Atlanta, examining Governor Lester Maddox's "New Morality." Trillin records a Maddox Christmas message in which the former restaurateur noted, "There will be more automobiles, more shoes, more record-players, more television sets, more ties, more shirts, more dresses, more cosmetics, more watches and diamonds sold in the name of Christ this...
...equally strong interest in the less sacred aspects of American commerce takes Trillin to the Fifth Annual Paul Bunyan Snowmobile Derby in Brainerd, Minn., the auction stalls on Atlantic City's boardwalk, and a national U.S. Jaycee gathering in Phoenix, where the campaign for the presidency is only a little less elaborate than the Democratic and Republican conventions. (The successful candidate gets to spend a year living at the Jaycee's White House in Tulsa, and his wife is often referred to as the First Lady...
Wherever he goes, Trillin resists the temptation to put his pulse on the finger of the nation. There is never any doubt about where his sympathies lie but, like his late colleague, The New Yorker's A.J. Liebling, Trillin exhibits great technical control and a quiet passion for fairness and precision. He is, to use a phrase that Liebling reserved for high praise, "a careful writer." · R.Z. Sheppard