One Potato Review

The fond, accessible remembrances of a very grown-up writer. Here are vines to swing on in summer, and tunnels to build in the snow. Here are milkmen and icemen and trucks dumping coal in your cellar, and a trip to the top of the Empire State Building when there was nothing else like it in the world. Here are tough kids to be scared of, and Wanted posters that seem to describe every other person in your neighborhood, tricks you can’t master (whistling loud with two fingers), and tricks you can (falling on your face without getting hurt). This and Stevenson’s I Had a Lot of Wishes are a little like William Steig’s When Everybody Wore a Hat. Both writers have feet planted in two worlds: amazingly still young enough to remember the wonder and blessed gullibility of growing up, yet all the while equipped with the perspective of the most experienced journalist to be able to pick out the good parts. Funny, wise and wistful.