See you on the radio - Hardcover

Charles Osgood anchors CBS News Sunday Morning, and writes and anchors The Osgood File four times daily over the CBS radio network. Among his many awards are three Emmys and three George Foster Peabody Awards, and in 1990 he was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters' Broadcasting Hall of Fame. He lives in New Jersey.

A collection of the radio and television pundits best work, from the past eight years. Charles Osgood, like Art Buchwald or Erma Bombeck, possesses the sort of wry wit that seems quintessentially American, the ability to gently mock this country and its citizens with plain old common sense. Most of the pieces in the book, which are taken from Osgoods CBS radio broadcasts, concern people and the very strange things they do or say, and the book is divided into suitable sections, such as ``HPF (The Human Perversity Factor),'' which includes an essay on a convention held by and for lightning strike victims, or ``Money Draws Flies,'' in which Osgood discourses on, among other topics, the hazards of winning the lottery. The author runs the gamut of topics from political correctness to patriotism, and while reading too many in one sitting is somewhat cloying, theres something to chuckle at in almost every piece. Osgood is particularly good at pointing up the foibles of both people and institutions, and finds particular pleasure in taking inflated government agencies or their minions to task, as, for instance, in a piece on the modernization of the IRS. Yesterday the IRS brass appeared before a House appropriations subcommittee. This is the subcommittee that oversees the people who are overseeing the people who are modernizing the modernization program. Several of the essays are accompanied by doggerel that ranges from groaningly bad to delightful (such as when he includes the name of the drug sysnyntenoctadecanoamide in verse). This is the sort of collection that Osgoods fans will adoreand it may even win him some new ones. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.