The Attentive Eye

Book excerpt: This book is an album of the famous and infamous seen through the attentive eye of the late journalist Helen Dudar "a writer," as the editor's preface remarks, "of wit, grace, rigor, intellect and astonishing range." In these pages, Paul Cézanne cohabits with John Updike, Sigmund Freud with Shelley Winters, Michael Douglas with Malcolm X; Dylan Thomas and Janice Joplin are discovered sleeping under the same roof, although in different beds and at different times; Woody Allen is encountered as a young comic on the way up, Henry Kissinger as a world leader on the way down, Norman Mailer as an office-seeker on the way nowhere. The threads binding them together in these fifty-two stories are Dudar's luminous prose, her authoritative voice, and her keen, ironic vision. "She is a writer's writer, a journalist's journalist, and a reporter's reporter," the filmmaker Nora Ephron says in her introduction. "...Helen Dudar writes frequently about everything and does it better than just about anyone else." The Editor