[Scribble Scribble] is as clean, tart and refreshing as the first gin-and-tonic of the summer….

Nora Ephron writes, at all times, with clarity, directness and wit; and with a casual, agreeable chattiness well suited to her subject. It is as if she were calling on the phone at 10 A.M. to bounce a few impressions off you over coffee. Her best moments come when she takes off into manic flight and seems suddenly transformed into Woody Allen; or, perhaps, into a somewhat more malicious Roger Angell….

On those infrequent occasions when she becomes truly incensed, she can be brutal…. (p. 7)

The book, however, is not without flaws. All collections would seem to suffer, to some degree, from unevenness, but "Scribble Scribble" more than most. There is included here a piece about an uncle of Miss Ephron's who did carpet commercials on television, which, even at the time of its magazine publication, could hardly have been of interest to anyone outside her immediate family; and there is an equally inexplicable account of a newsletter distributed throughout an apartment building in which Miss Ephron once resided. There is, in fact, such a wide, seemingly random diversity to the pieces as to make the whole—the book—not quite equal to the sum of its parts. One has no sense here of sustained seriousness of purpose; of the consistent application of critical intelligence that one finds, for instance, in the television criticism of Michael Arlen, or the book reviewing of Geoffrey Wolff. Perhaps this is because Miss Ephron never particularly wanted to write a news media column in the first place. She wanted, she tells us, "simply to find some subject to write about in order to get back into the front of Esquire magazine." She found her subject—the news media—and when she got bored with it, or grew sufficiently troubled by the awareness that she was making too much of too little, she had the good sense to stop. Leaving us with this bright, amusing, razor-edged souvenir.