HE WAS A MIDWESTERN BOY ON HIS OWN

Another greatly engaging collection of Greene's Chicago Tribune and Esquire columns. As before (Cheeseburgers, 1985, etc.), Greene roams America in search of the humorous, the poignant, the nostalgic, the exemplary-and brings home one memorable story after another. Here, he writes exuberantly of his date with the original Doublemint Twins, now middle-aged; talks to America's ``most extreme workaholic,'' a St. Louis radio- station manager who works from 2:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. every day; attends a convention of women named ``Linda''; reports in a devastating deadpan on a bar where male patrons water-gun nearly naked bargirls; tries to buy an abandoned Maine high school at auction; tracks down the owner of a lost SuperBowl ring, and so on. Occasionally, his prose steers into the pious or the sentimental (dying children, the lost joys of youth), but for the most part this is a softly philosophical, gently humane, highly entertaining harvesting from one of America's very best columnists.