Research Catalog

Title

Too soon to say goodbye / Art Buchwald.

Author

Buchwald, Art.

Publication

New York : Random House, [2006], ©2006.

Supplementary Content

• Contributor biographical information
• Publisher description

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 189 pages; 21 cm

Summary

"When doctors told Art Buchwald that his kidneys were kaput, the renowned humorist declined dialysis and checked into a Washington, D.C., hospice to live out his final days. Months later, "The Man Who Wouldn't Die" was still there, feeling good, holding court in a nonstop "salon" for his family and dozens of famous friends, and confronting things you usually don't talk about before you die; he even jokes about them." "Here Buchwald shares not only his remarkable experience - as dozens of old pals from Ethel Kennedy to John Glenn to the Queen of Swaziland join the party - but also his whole wonderful life: his first love, an early brush with death in a foxhole on Eniwetok Atoll, his fourteen champagne years in Paris, fame as a columnist syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, and his incarnation as hospice superstar. Buchwald also shares his sorrows: coping with an absent mother, childhood in a foster home, and separation from his wife, Ann." "He plans his funeral (with a priest, a rabbi, and Billy Graham, to cover all the bases) and strategizes how to land a big obituary in The New York Times ("Make sure no head of state or Nobel Prize winner dies on the same day"). He describes how he and a few of his famous friends finagled cut-rate burial plots on Martha's Vineyard and how he acquired a Picasso drawing without really trying." "What we have here is a national treasure, the complete Buchwald, uncertain of where the next days or weeks may take him but unfazed by the inevitable, living life to the fullest, with frankness, dignity, and humor."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• Humorists, American > 20th century > Biography
• Buchwald, Art

Note

• Includes index.
• Reflections on life and death, written from a Washington, D.C. area hospice.

ISBN

• 9781400066278 (alk. paper)
• 1400066271 (alk. paper)
• 9781400066278

LCCN

2006049266

OCLC

• 71322373
• ocm71322373
• SCSB-5303970

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries