Honest Rainmaker

A welcome reminder of the multifaceted talents and fecund curiosity of the legendary New Yorker writer, this chronicles Liebling's fascination with the shenanigans of wayward septuagenarian horse-racing journalist James A. Macdonald, aka Col. John R. Stingo. As the two roam Manhattan saloons and seamy neighborhoods in the 1940s, Stingo's effervescent, overblown, inimitable chatter--liberally laced with ``labyrinthian'' digressions--affectionately recalls and reinvents (he ``never permits facts to interfere with the exercise of his imagination'') a motley crew of swindlers, suckers and crazies. A hunchbacked shoeshine man at the Belmont Park racing track sells women a good-luck touch of his hump for $10; a self-made scientist convinces the Belmont authorities that he can prevent rain; a racing sheet publisher is sued by a neglected wife ``because she said if I hadn't given him the winners he wouldn't have had any money the broads would have let him alone he would of been home with her!''no punctuation,just one long runon/pk (Nov.)