Reviews for Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays

The average rating for Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-23 00:00:00 Daniel Landau This collection of shorts is vastly overshadowed by his blockbuster, Bridges of Madison County, but nevertheless well worth a read just for the homespun, poignant stories, mostly autobiographical or from personal contacts, I assume. He leads off with 'Excavating Rachel's Room', which deals with his thoughts about his daughter leaving home to find adulthood--many of us can relate to that, and you will be moved by his thoughts and wishes for his daughter. I especially enjoyed 'The Boy from the Burma Hump', which deals with flying in Asia, something personal to me. I also read a couple of his other works, but found them less deserving than this one. His creation of the male character in 'Bridges' apparently really sticks with people, as anecdotes say that people still show up at National Geographic wanting to see the Robert Kincaid photo exhibit. Kincaid of course was a totally fictional character, but very real in so many readers minds. You may note that Robert James Waller died a couple years ago in Fredericksburg, Texas.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-31 00:00:00 Thomas Boehmer I am of mixed mind in deciding how to rate this book. The stories are mostly good and well written. They offer an interesting look at the Iowa Waller knew as a boy and the Iowa of the late 1980s when most of these essays were written. His love for his home state and the outdoors comes shining through. But there are also things that bother me. These are, in fact, old songs. Each essay was previously published, mostly in the Des Moines Register. Their publication in this book is clearly the author and publisher trying to cash in on the huge popularity of Waller's The Bridges of Madison County. But there's nothing particularly wrong with that. It's that the essays always seem self-serving. Waller shows himself as an accomplished musician, a poet, a photographer, the kid who beat the local pool champ, who became a master of the basketball jump shot but walked away from the college career because it no longer interested him, who played the "Wabash Cannonball" for a Charles Kuralt "On the Road" piece that led to a gig playing for Bobby Kennedy on his whistlestop tour in 1968, who became the dean of a college business school, which seems the most improbable of all. If nothing else, the man has led a charmed life. There's also his oft-mentioned love for his wife Georgia Ann and his thankfulness for her putting up with his many flights of fancy over their decades together. All of which had me thinking, "Here's a guy who sounds a whole lot better on paper than I'll bet he is in person." So I Googled him. Sure enough, with all that money, he and his wife moved to Texas, he began an affair with their gardener, dumped Georgia and married the new woman. It makes me look at these essays with a more jaundiced eye and perhaps from enjoying them as much as I might have.