cover image 52 MCGS.: The Best Obituaries from Legendary New York Times
 Reporter Robert McG. Thomas Jr.

52 MCGS.: The Best Obituaries from Legendary New York Times Reporter Robert McG. Thomas Jr.

Robert McG Thomas, , intro. by Thomas Mallon. . Scribner, $20 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-1562-6

A "lover of the farfetched and the overlooked," as novelist Mallon puts it in his appreciative introduction, the late New York Times reporter Robert McG. Thomas Jr. (1939–2000) developed a loyal following for quirky, witty obituaries that illuminated the lives of people not automatically destined for "the Newspaper of Record." This highly browsable collection of 52 obits shows Thomas at his deadline best. Readers meet Ted Hustead, builder of the internationally renowned South Dakota drugstore, Wall Drug, "a tourist attraction that seems famous largely for its very fame." There's also the classic hustler Minnesota Fats, about whom "the only certainty was that you could never know for sure"; Marshall Berger, "who taught generations of Noo Yawkahs how not to speak the Kings County English"; and the 1950s hipster Anton Rosenberg, who was so prototypical that "he never amounted to much of anything." Other subjects include the character actor Emil Sitka, foil of the Three Stooges; Francine Katzenbogen, a lottery millionaire who used her winnings to help cats; Maurice Sagoff, who wrote "Shrinklets," which condensed literary classics into humorous verse; and Edward Lowe, the inventor of Kitty Litter. As Michael T. Kaufman explains in the obituary of the author that closes this volume, Thomas himself had a career "more circuitous than meteoric," hence his sympathy for underachievers and late bloomers. Such sympathy reminds readers that the obituary page need not be leaden and dutiful. (Nov.)

FYI: Calhoun is a literary agent at Sterling Lord.