Friends Talking in the Night: Sixty Years of Writing for the New Yorker

Here's the century, or at least the post-WWII century, as seen not panoramically by an anchorman and photographers but impressionistically by a polished prose stylist with an eye for how detail can open up even the briefest of essays or sketches. From a 1939 article on the Bettmann Archive to last year's appreciation of New Yorker colleague Brendan Gill, these pieces (which appeared as New Yorker ""Profiles,"" ""Talk of the Town"" bits and ""Letters"" from all over the world) show Hamburger to be a classic practitioner of literate understatement, clearly a disciple of his exacting editor, William Shawn. There's a chilling essay called ""The End of Mussolini,"" in which Hamburger concludes by wondering, amid the bombed-out rubble of Milan's church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, about the fate of Leonardo's Last Supper. In a 1945 ""Letter from Berchtesgaden,"" Hamburger focuses on the banality, indeed the tackiness, of evil made manifest in Hitler's mountain retreat: ""And into this room he crowded forty-six chairs, one more ugly than the next--low-slung chairs covered with sickly blue imitation needle point."" Readers will also find portraits of Harry Truman, Oscar Hammerstein II and others, as well as delightful diversions--like the one about Louie the Waiter, a New York delicatessen legend renowned for ""his ability to sell War Bonds in large amounts to customers who enter the store with nothing more in mind than a plate of chopped liver."" Readers who fell in love (sometimes for the second time) with Hamburger's close friend Joseph Mitchell when Up in the Old Hotel was published will be just as happy to have their fill of Hamburger. (Feb.)