Background
Trillin, Calvin was born on December 5, 1935 in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. Son of Abe and Edyth Trillin.
(When two gas station attendants find what appears to be a...)
When two gas station attendants find what appears to be a Viking runestone while clamming, a (fictional) small Maine town goes agog with Viking enthusiasm. Berryville is set to lay claim to be the site of America's first Nordic colonists, although there are some skeptics, too. A comic novel, including some fine faux country-music lyrics.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316852759/?tag=2022091-20
( A reissue of Calvin Trillin's memoir of his relationshi...)
A reissue of Calvin Trillin's memoir of his relationship with a brilliant but tragic Yale classmate that is also a rumination on social change in the 1950s and 1960s Remembering Denny is perhaps Calvin Trillin's most inspired and powerful book: a memoir of a friendship, a work of investigative reporting, and an exploration of a country and a time that captures something essential about how America has changed since Trillin--and Denny Hansen--were graduated from Yale in 1957. Roger "Denny" Hansen had seemed then a college hero for the ages: a charmer with a dazzling smile, the subject of a feature in Life magazine, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a varsity swimmer, a Rhodes scholar...perhaps a future president, as his friends only half-joked. But after early jobs in government and journalism, Hansen's life increasingly took a downward turn and he gradually lost touch with family and old friends before eventually committing suicide--an obscure, embittered, pain-racked professor--in 1991. In contemplating his friend's life, Calvin Trillin considers questions both large and small--what part does the pressure of high expectations place on even the most gifted, how difficult might it have been to be a closeted homosexual in the unyielding world of the 1960s Foreign Service, how much responsibility does the individual bear for all that happens in his life--in a book that is also a meditation on our country's evolving sense of itself.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374529744/?tag=2022091-20
(The New Yorker's Calvin Trillin loves food while despisin...)
The New Yorker's Calvin Trillin loves food while despising the tres haut Francophile gourmet -- the kind who can produce a dissertation on the proper consistency of sauce Bearnaise. Trillin knows that the search for good food requires constant vigilance particularly when outside the Big Apple. Not that Cincinnati and Houston and Kansas City (his hometown) lack magnificent places to eat -- if one can resist the importunities of those well meaning ignoramuses who insist on hauling you off to La Maison de la Casa House, the pride of local epicures too dumb to realize that the noblest culinary creations of the American heartland are barbecued ribs, fried chicken, hash browns and hamburgers. Trillin is ready to do battle for K.C.'s Winstead's as the home of the greatest burger in the USA. Generally, he advises, you will do fine if you avoid ""any restaurant the executive secretary of the chamber of commerce is particularly proud of."" Also, any restaurant with (ply)wood paneling and ""atmosphere,"" where the food is likely to taste ""something like a medium-rare sponge."" This then is not a celebration of multi-star ""restaurants"" but of diners, roadhouses, eateries -- the kind that serve food on wax paper or plastic plates and to hell with Craig Claiborne. With tongue in stuffed cheek Trillin gives the finger to the food snobs, confessing his secret vices with fiendish glee and high good humor.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385004400/?tag=2022091-20
(Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the “continen...)
Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the “continental cuisine” palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House. What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go anywhere to find one. As it happens, some of his favorite dishes can be found only in their place of origin. Join Trillin on his charming, funny culinary adventures as he samples fried marlin in Barbados and the barbecue of his boyhood in Kansas City. Travel alongside as he hunts for the authentic fish taco, and participates in a “boudin blitzkrieg” in the part of Louisiana where people are accustomed to buying these spicy sausages and polishing them off in the parking lot. (“Cajun boudin not only doesn’t get outside the state, it usually doesn’t even get home.”) In New York, Trillin even tries to use a glorious local specialty, the bagel, to lure his daughters back from California. Feeding a Yen is a delightful reminder of why New York magazine called Calvin Trillin “our funniest food writer.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375759964/?tag=2022091-20
(Displaying the form that made bestsellers of Obliviously ...)
Displaying the form that made bestsellers of Obliviously On He Sails and A Heckuva Job, tales of the Bush Administration in rhyme, Calvin Trillin trains his verse on the 2008 race for the presidency. Deciding the Next Decider is an ongoing campaign narrative in verse interrupted regularly by other poems, such as a country tune about John Edwards called “Yes, I Know He’s a Mill Worker’s Son, But There’s Hollywood in That Hair” and a Sarah Palin song about her foreign policy credentials: “On a Clear Day, I See Vladivostok.” It covers Mitt Romney’s transformation (“Mitt Romney’s saying now he should have known / A stem cell’s just a human, not quite grown”), the speculation about whether Al Gore was trimming down to run (“Presumably, they looked for photo ops / To see what Gore was stuffing in his chops”), the slow-motion implosion of Hillary Clinton’s drive to the White House (“Some pundits wrote that Hil’s campaign might fare / A little better if Bill wasn’t there”), and the differing responses of Barack Obama and John McCain to the financial crisis (“Though coolness has its limitations, it’ll / Prevent comparisons with Chicken Little”). Beginning at the 2006 midterms, Deciding the Next Decider resurrects the nonstarters like George Allen (“He fit what’s often valued by the Right: / Quite cheerful, Reaganesque, and not too bright”) and the low-energy Fred Thompson (“The pros said, ‘That’s a state he has to take, / And he just might, if he can stay awake’ ”). And it carries through to the vote that made Barack Obama the forty-fourth president of the United States.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400068282/?tag=2022091-20
(In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was p...)
In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–his loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.” Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who “seemed to glow.” “You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later. “You mean I peaked in December of 1963?” “I’m afraid so.” But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.” In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400066158/?tag=2022091-20
(Somehow, despite everything Calvin Trillin wrote about th...)
Somehow, despite everything Calvin Trillin wrote about the Bush Administration in Obliviously On He Sails, his 2004 bestseller in verse, George W. Bush is still in the White House. Taking a philosophical view, Trillin has said, “We weren’t going to know whether you could bring down a presidency with iambic pentameter until somebody tried it.” Now Trillin is trying again, back at his pithy and hilarious best to comment on the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq (“Then terrorists could count on what we’d do: / Attack us, we’ll strike back, though not at you”), his religiosity (“He treats his critics in the press / As if they’re yapping Pekineses. / Reporters deal in mundane facts; / This man has got the word from Jesus”), and whether he was wearing a transmitting device in the first presidential debate (“Could this explain his odd expressions? Is there proof he / Was being told, ‘If you can hear me now, look goofy’?”) Trillin deals with the people around Bush, such as Nanny Dick Cheney and Mushroom Cloud Rice and Orange John Ashcroft and Orange John’s successor, Alberto Gonzales (“The A.G.’s to be one Alberto Gonzales– / Dependable, actually loyal über alles”). He tries to predict the behavior of the famously intemperate John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations in poems with titles like “Bolton Chases French Ambassador Up Tree” and “White House Says Bolton Can Do Job Even While in Straitjacket.” Finally, in dealing with whether the entire Bush Administration, like the unfortunate Brownie, has done a heckuva job, he composes a small-government sea chantey for the Republicans: ’Cause government’s the problem, lads, Americans would all do well to shun it. Yes, government’s the problem, lads. At least it is when we’re the ones who run it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400065569/?tag=2022091-20
(Does the Bush Administration sound any better in rhyme? I...)
Does the Bush Administration sound any better in rhyme? In this biting array of verse, it at least sounds funnier. Calvin Trillin employs everything from a Gilbert and Sullivan style, for describing George Bush’s rescue in the South Carolina primary by the Christian Right (“I am, when all is said and done, a Robertson Republican”), to a bilingual approach, when commenting on the President’s casual acknowledgment, after months of trying to persuade the nation otherwise, that there was never any evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11: “The Web may say, or maybe Lexis-Nexis / If chutzpa is a word they use in Texas.” Trillin deals not only with George W. Bush but with the people around him—Supreme Commander Karl Rove and Condoleezza (Mushroom Cloud) Rice and Nanny Dick Cheney (“One mystery I’ve tried to disentangle: / Why Cheney’s head is always at an angle . . .”) The armchair warriors Trillin refers to as the Sissy Hawk Brigade are celebrated in such poems as “Richard Perle: Whose Fault Is He?” and “A Sissy Hawk Cheer” (“All-out war is still our druthers— / Fiercely fought, and fought by others.”). Trillin may never be poet laureate—certainly not while George W. Bush is in office—but his wit and his political insight produce what has been called “doggerel for the ages.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400062888/?tag=2022091-20
(In January 1961, following eighteen months of litigation ...)
In January 1961, following eighteen months of litigation that culminated in a federal court order, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to enter the University of Georgia. Calvin Trillin, then a reporter for Time Magazine, attended the court fight that led to the admission of Holmes and Hunter and covered their first week at the university--a week that began in relative calm, moved on to a riot and the suspension of the two students "for their own safety," and ended with both returning to the campus under a new court order.Shortly before their graduation in 1963, Trillin came back to Georgia to determine what their college lives had been like. He interviewed not only Holmes and Hunter but also their families, friends, and fellow students, professors, and university administrators. The result was this book--a sharply detailed portrait of how these two young people faced coldness, hostility, and occasional understanding on a southern campus in the midst of a great social change.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0820313882/?tag=2022091-20
(Die Madonnendarstellung in Der Altniederlandischen Kunst ...)
Die Madonnendarstellung in Der Altniederlandischen Kunst Von Jan Van Eyck Bis Zu Den Manieristen (1906)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FBBRSUI/?tag=2022091-20
Trillin, Calvin was born on December 5, 1935 in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. Son of Abe and Edyth Trillin.
Bachelor, Yale University, 1957. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Beloit College, 1987. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Albertus Magnus College, 1990.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University Missouri, 2003. Doctor of Letters (honorary), State University of New York, 1996. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University North Carolina, 1998.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), Susquehanna University, 1999. Doctor of Literature (honorary), Long Island University, 2002.
Reporter, writer, Time magazine, 1960-1963; staff writer, New Yorker magazine, since 1963; columnist, Nation magazine, 1978-1985; syndicated columnist, 1986-1995; columnist, Time magazine, since 1996. Trustee New York Public Library.
( A reissue of Calvin Trillin's memoir of his relationshi...)
(What, you may ask, is easygoing, noncommital (except when...)
(In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was p...)
(In January 1961, following eighteen months of litigation ...)
(Displaying the form that made bestsellers of Obliviously ...)
(The New Yorker's Calvin Trillin loves food while despisin...)
(When two gas station attendants find what appears to be a...)
(Somehow, despite everything Calvin Trillin wrote about th...)
(Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the “continen...)
(Does the Bush Administration sound any better in rhyme? I...)
(Die Madonnendarstellung in Der Altniederlandischen Kunst ...)
(This book is written with humor concerning the U.S.-- pol...)
(Uncivil Liberties by by Calvin Trillin)
(New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983. First edition. 8vo. Har...)
(Leather Franklin Library book.)
(white hardcover)
(humor)
(Book)
Member of American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Married Alice Stewart, August 13, 1965 (deceased). Children: Abigail, Sarah.