THE BEAST IN ME AND OTHER ANIMALS

Top Thurber, this collection not only of his magazine pieces but his recent drawings and selections from the New Yorker Talk of the Town researches, this should have its own avid audience. For Thurber with his ability to pinion party pettiness, the embattled female against the wary male, the nonsensical as well as the stupid, has become one of our more expert, and always intelligent, humorists. The section on soap operas is a complete investigation into one of radio's unbelievable, if well-paid, manifestation his high-handed unnatural history; his odd fables, sketches and public rebuttals in the realm of words, facts, dog naming; his own drawings; his politics, and so on- all combine to make a companionable volume whose potpourri qualities are heightened by the variety of his inclusions. Swell reading- for odd moments, and more serious.