{"id":1561,"date":"2012-10-04T20:51:27","date_gmt":"2012-10-05T04:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1561"},"modified":"2012-10-04T20:51:27","modified_gmt":"2012-10-05T04:51:27","slug":"review-hello-goodbye-hello","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1561","title":{"rendered":"Review: Hello Goodbye Hello"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Hello Goodbye Hello<\/em> is a unique bit of fun by Craig Brown.\u00a0 The idea is simple and intriguing: start with the unlikely meeting of two well known people and tell that story, then follow one of them to another meeting and describe that, then follow the new one to another meeting, and so on.\u00a0 And make a circle.\u00a0 It feels like a party game, and reading <em>Hello Goodbye Hello<\/em> gives that feeling of improvisation and fun.<\/p>\n<p>Brown makes a couple choices that make the whole thing more compelling.\u00a0 He keeps each anecdote short, which keeps the players from wearing out their welcome.\u00a0 He also allows himself a fair amount of leeway.\u00a0 Some of the stories are about famous people in their youth who are literally dumbstruck by encountering someone more famous.\u00a0 It&#8217;s to his credit that Brown can usually make even these glancing collisions interesting.<\/p>\n<p>Of course not all of these meetings are interesting.\u00a0 Over the course of the book he spans English nobility, Russian composers, American movie idols, and Mark Twain. It&#8217;s a lot of ground to cover, and there were some dry stretches for me.\u00a0 It doesn&#8217;t help that Brown is British, and some of the folks he includes were completely unknown to me, though from context well known in Britain.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, the book keeps the feel of an interesting dinner party where everyone seems to have an interesting story to tell.\u00a0 Even the tales that are about people you&#8217;ve never heard of are told with style.\u00a0 There are plenty of new things to hear, even if they&#8217;re not all about the stars of the anecdotes.<\/p>\n<p>Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello Goodbye Hello is a unique bit of fun by Craig Brown.\u00a0 The idea is simple and intriguing: start with the unlikely meeting of two well known people and tell that story, then follow one of them to another meeting and describe that, then follow the new one to another meeting, and so on.\u00a0 And [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1561"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1563,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions\/1563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}