Simon Says: The Best of Roger Simon

A columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, Simon here ranges over subjects from politics to the media to tearjerker anecdotes, with varying results. He is at his best with politics, displaying amused tolerance for its practitioners. He is capable of outrage, as in a column about Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson's questionable expenditures benefiting himself and his family, and he comes close to hero-worship in an essay on Hubert Humphrey. But, by and large, he views politicians as monomaniacs who must run for office. Simon's columns on newspapers and journalists are stereotyped, and the human-interest pieces become annoying because they are so obviously manipulativefor example, the story of a teenager who died of cancer. There are, however, more pluses here than minuses. November