Paul Grondahl

Advance praise

​"Paul Grondahl has written the biography Andy Rooney deserved. Rooney was in his way brilliant, an American original. He was also human in the full sense of the term, which is to say complicated. A great read."

― Peter L. W. Osnos, founder of Andy Rooney’s longtime publisher PublicAffairs
 

"I first met Andrew in 1984 when I was hired as an assistant producer on 60 Minutes and later I became his producer, which lasted for sixteen years. In all that time I thought I knew him well, but after reading Paul Grondahl's insightful biography, I miss him even more, as will you, the reader."

― Susie Bieber, Andy Rooney’s 60 Minutes producer

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"During the course of my thirty years as a 60 Minutes correspondent, the one question I was almost always asked was, 'What is Andy Rooney really like?' I always answered, 'Just like the cranky old guy you see on TV.'

It was the reason for his enormous popularity. He was real, plain spoken, and pretension free and always said exactly what was on his mind. He had a wonderfully complicated, clever mind. Now, Paul Grondahl has given us the biography that Andy deserves. He was the Will Rogers of his generation, and every week tens of millions of people invited him into their living room for a few minutes that might gin up a national conversation.

He is remembered mostly as a humorist, but he was also a philosopher, a critic, and an influential journalist, whose Peabody Award-winning CBS documentary Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington not only changed television reporting but serves as a handbook for aspiring journalists."

― Steve Kroft, former 60 Minutes correspondent

"Normally, we don't like grumpy curmudgeons. Yet for three decades Andy Rooney’s grumpy and always witty three-minute commentary at the conclusion of 60 Minutes was the most popular segment of that hit show. In this vivid biography, Paul Grondahl paints a delicious picture of this amazing character―an uncompromising man who would not bend to flatter his bosses or his audience."

― Ken Auletta, author of Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way

"Millions of Americans savored their 'Few Minutes with Andy Rooney' each week when he was the crusty fixture on CBS’s 60 Minutes―a true heir to H. L. Mencken in the peak era of network television. Paul Grondahl's superb biography is as vivid and crisp as one of Rooney's own monologues. It also makes us see that Rooney was a far-sighted innovator who did as much as any newsman of his time to create the new age of the larger-than-life media 'brand.'"

― Sam Tanenhaus, author of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America

"Andy Rooney was my friend, but that didn’t protect me from his curmudgeoning. When we met, he delivered the mudge, and he got as good as he gave. That was his life, and it made him the most popular figure on television.

Now Paul Grondahl has written a hilariously entertaining and consequential book that zeros in marvelously on all that mudge and how it nagged him all his life with deep disappointment in not being recognized as a literary writer. Andy tried for that and failed but remained a great wit who kept us laughing and applauding his sarcasm.

I don’t know how he would’ve done at the Algonquin Round Table, but I think he was just as witty and twice as funny as some of those literary icons.

Banishing someone to literary oblivion doesn’t always work. Sometimes the joke is on the banisher. Andy is right up there with Will Rogers as a commentator who understood the secret of laughter."

― William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed