Being There: Jour­nal­ism 1978 – 2000 by Tom Tei­cholz is like the best din­ner par­ty you nev­er went to with guests such as Jeff Bridges, Phoebe Cates, Michael Milken, Russ Mey­er, Roz Chast, Issac Bashe­vis-Singer, Jerzy Kosin­s­ki, Cyn­thia Ozick, Tom McGuane, Bill Gra­ham, and Baron Guy De Roth­schild, among oth­ers, con­ver­sa­tions rang­ing from lit­er­a­ture and film to the lives and careers of S. J. Perel­man John Delore­an and S. I. New­house, dis­cus­sions of Pres­i­dent Reagan’s trip to Bit­burg, the first Iraq war, and a Nazi War Crimes tri­al being held in Israel for the first time since the Eich­mann tri­al. With arti­cles that orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Inter­view, The Paris Review, The New York Times Mag­a­zine, and The New York­er​’s ​“Talk of the Town.” As a bonus, sev­er­al nev­er-before-seen pieces unearthed from the archives add extra spice to this extra­or­di­nary non­fic­tion collection.