radio

I read this book about 15 years ago and was delighted to find it on amazon. This is a keeper, one that you can browse through over and over again. It contains stories of little known aspects of the lives of very well known people and is rather like an encyclopaedia based on People magazine. The element of surprise at the end gives a delightful twist to each story.

As Napoleon indicated, History is the lies upon which we've all agreed. There is no such thing as a work of history that doesn't leave some important element out. Partly that's to make history more palatable for a new generation -- who really wants to know about dentistry in the Colonial era when we're reading about George Washington and his false teeth? No matter what the reason, though, once an item is left out of history it tends to disappear permanently.

Unless Paul Harvey Jr. gets his hands on it.

Paul Harvey Jr, who writes the short vignettes for his father's radio show "The Rest of the Story," has a gift for uncovering forgotten facts. Did you know there was another Three Stooges? Did you know Jack Benny was invited to join the Marx Brothers? Did you know one of our Founding Fathers kept his wife chained in the basement because of persistent congenital madness? I hadn't known that.

This book is an incomplete collection of Harvey's vignettes for his father's show. Some are published under the name "Paul Aurendt," and if you can find them, jump on them with both feet. However, this book provides a good primer for the forgotten corners of history, and also allows you to own copies of the vignettes Harvey has made famous over the last 25 years. One can only hope that Harvey's example will inspire more historians to investigate the forgotten corners of history and find what's been otherwise forgotten. I'd buy more of these books if more of them were available.

What is so memorable about Paul Harvey's stories is the impact with which one is left long after having read the peice.

His is a perspective which simultaneously realizes the innocence and the experience of the human character. A snapshot of both our potential and our pain. And it is this acceptanece, a simplistic understanding, that allows the essence of the situation to remain with the reader. Thus, initially, the reader must be trusted by the author to be capable of that understanding.

This is Harvey's talent: to assume and place before an audience not only the humanity of his subject, but also of themselves.