Book: Poor Russell's Almanac

Overview
Poor Russell's Almanac is Russell Baker’s wry, quick-footed portrait of American life at the start of the 1970s, assembled from the voice and sensibility that made his New York Times “Observer” column beloved. Published in 1972, it borrows the authority and homespun pose of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack and uses that antique mask to examine the brisk absurdities of modern politics, media, commerce, and everyday habits. The result is a compact time capsule of an anxious, noisy era, filtered through a comic intelligence that prefers a raised eyebrow to a wagging finger.

Structure and Conceit
Baker organizes the book around the almanac idea, calendars, forecasts, proverbs, and useful “facts” that are anything but, to create a loose annual cycle through which his short essays and sketches can saunter. The conceit lets him play at being a practical sage while gently undermining the very notion of practical wisdom in a culture that keeps producing new confusions. Weather becomes a metaphor for public moods, predictions lampoon our appetite for certainty, and pithy sayings expose the slippery evasions of modern language. The almanac frame stitches together pieces that range from miniature parables to mock instructions, giving the book momentum without forcing it into a single narrative.

Subjects and Targets
The political world of the Nixon years, campaign spectacle, press briefings, the choreography of official optimism, appears regularly, not as a dossier to prosecute but as a theater to observe. Baker catches the verbal tics of government spokesmen, the swagger of pollsters, and the ritual solemnity with which small events are sold as national turning points. He also charts the domestic front: traffic, airports, schoolrooms, the television that fills the living room with booming certainty, the temptations of advertising, and the mild indignities of modern convenience. Consumer abundance tugs against unease about the environment, inflation, and social fracturing. He lets generational tensions and cultural skirmishes drift through like passing weather systems, noting how adults and children, suburbs and cities, old manners and new freedoms jostle one another with comic inevitability.

Style and Techniques
Baker’s humor is a blend of deadpan logic and nimble metaphor. He often begins with a proposition that sounds reasonable, then follows it to a ludicrous but oddly faithful conclusion, exposing the evasions and clichés that prop up official narratives. He loves the shapes of language, bureaucratese, advertising sparkle, the wobbly grandeur of political rhetoric, and he imitates those idioms so precisely that their hollowness becomes unmistakable. The pieces are compact, tuned for a clean last-line turn. There is an air of faux-sagacity in the aphorisms and forecasts, yet the joke is never merely on the gullible; it is on the restless, ingenious culture that keeps inventing new ways to be certain and new reasons to doubt.

Tone and Effect
What separates the book from sour satire is Baker’s humane steadiness. He is skeptical without cruelty and amused without condescension, a neighborly guide who trusts the reader’s own powers of recognition. The humor warms rather than scalds, which makes the sharper moments of exposure land more firmly. Read now, the pieces evoke a specific moment, late-war exhaustion, media expansion, technological promise, but the habits he diagnoses have hardly vanished. The itch for prediction, the smoothing of hard truths by cheerful language, the daily theater of expertise: these recur, and Baker’s almanac remains a pocket manual for seeing them clearly.

Place in Baker’s Work
Poor Russell’s Almanac sits at the center of Baker’s evolution from reporter to nationally read humorist, distilling the voice he honed in his column into a book with an organizing wit of its own. It anticipates the blend of observation, memory, and stylistic play that would define his later writing, and it shows how a light touch can carry serious intelligence. As a crafted object, a faux-almanac that helps the reader keep time with the culture, it is both a period piece and an enduring example of American newspaper wit at full stretch.