Meet And Greet And Meet

Hello Goodbye Hello by Craig Brown is a different sort of book.  It's about the meetings of famous people, but with a twist.  Each of its 101 short chapters (1001 words each) tells of a meeting, but the way it's structured, Chapter 1 is A meets B, followed by Chapter 2 where B meets C and so on.  And in the final chapter, Z meets A. (It's a bit like La Ronde, but that's a fictional play.)

And what a cast. Writers: Mark Twain, Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, J. D. Salinger.  Movie Stars: Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Alec Guinness. World Leaders: Hitler, Stalin, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon. Composers: Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Mahler. Pop stars: Madonna, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Elvis, Paul McCartney. Royalty: Queen Elizabeth II, Tsar Nicholas, Princess Di. Poets: T. S. Eliot, Jean Cocteau, Allen Ginsberg. Directors: Howard Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock. Dancers: Martha Graham, Isadora Duncan. Thinkers: Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud. Famous Spouses: Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan. Scene-makers: Andy Warhol, Truman Capote. Odds and ends: Helen Keller, Houdini.  And so on.

Some of the stories you may already know.  I'm a fan of the Beatles, so I didn't learn anything new about Paul McCartney.  Same for the Marx Brothers--both Groucho and Harpo make the list.  But I doubt anyone knows all the stories.  And they're told with some wit by British journalist Brown. (And if you don't like one story, skip it and go to the next.)

This book isn't deep.  It couldn't be.  But it's certainly got breadth.  No classic, perhaps, but worth checking out.