Too Soon to Say Goodbye by Art Buchwald

From Barnes & Noble

"Some people bless their hearts; I bless my kidney." Art Buchwald's somatic gesture isn't really misplaced. When the Pulitzer Prize–winning humorist refused dialysis early this year, doctors warned him that he would probably succumb within three weeks. Instead, he emerged from a hospice three months later and returned to a home he never expected to see again. This wonderfully unrestrained memoir skips across time, providing glimpses into Buchwald's botched romances, fondest wishes, and strongest pet peeves. Along the way, he offers lists (his "Five People I'd Like to Meet in Heaven" includes four Hollywood beauties and Judas), reflections (on mortality and parking, among other things), and advice about living life to its fullest. Inspiriting reminiscences by a soulful funnyman.

From the Publisher

When doctors told Art Buchwald that his kidneys were kaput, the renowned humorist declined dialysis and checked into a Washington, D.C., hospice to live out his final days. Months later, “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die” was still there, feeling good, holding court in a nonstop “salon” for his family and dozens of famous friends, and confronting things you usually don’t talk about before you die; he even jokes about them.
Here Buchwald shares not only his remarkable experience–as dozens of old pals from Ethel Kennedy to John Glenn to the Queen of Swaziland join the party–but also his whole wonderful life: his first love, an early brush with death in a foxhole on Eniwetok Atoll, his fourteen champagne years in Paris, fame as a columnist syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, and his incarnation as hospice superstar. Buchwald also shares his sorrows: coping with an absent mother, childhood in a foster home, and separation from his wife, Ann.
He plans his funeral (with a priest, a rabbi, and Billy Graham, to cover all the bases) and strategizes how to land a big obituary in The New York Times (“Make sure no head of state or Nobel Prize winner dies on the same day”). He describes how he and a few of his famous friends finagled cut-rate burial plots on Martha’s Vineyard and how he acquired a Picasso drawing without really trying.

What we have here is a national treasure, the complete Buchwald, uncertain of where the next days or weeks may take him but unfazed by the inevitable, living life to the fullest, with frankness, dignity, and humor.

“[Art Buchwald] has given his friends, theirfamilies, and his audiences so many laughs and so much joy through the years that that alone would be an enduring legacy. But Art has never been just about the quick laugh. His humor is a road map to essential truths and insights that might otherwise have eluded us.”
–Tom Brokaw

The New York Times - James Kaplan

… the book also has a serious — though not solemn — undertone. Amid an old man’s pardonably digressive reminiscences (some of which will nevertheless feel familiar to readers of Buchwald’s other books), he speaks feelingly about the realities of death: living wills; the grief of other, less fortunate hospice residents and their families; and the strange American habit of trying to ignore life’s end. Art Buchwald has looked straight on at his own “dirt nap,” with liberating results. “People told me,” he writes, “they loved talking to someone who wasn’t afraid to discuss death.”

Product Details