WARTS AND ALL

Having reached age four score, Mansfield expressed
concern about who might want to read “a geezer’s
musings.” Still, he chose the book’s title, WARTS
AND ALL, meaning ‘the whole thing, not concealing
the less attractive parts.’ It’s about family and friends,
wins and losses, triumphs and failures, praise and
derision, love and hate, humor and pathos, wisdom
and folly, commendation and reproach, conservatism
and liberalism, joy and sadness, war and peace and
just about anything else.
His primary inspiration is the late Dr. Charles
Krauthammer, specifically his 2015 book, Things
That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and
Politics. Per Amazon, he was “America’s preeminent
columnist, named by the Financial Times the most
influential commentator in the nation.” Mansfield
considers him a man of unparalleled intellect.
The other major inspiration is Mansfield’s lifelong
friend, classmate and teammate, Tom Kiley, co-author
of their acclaimed 2021 book THE PERFECT SEASON:
The Untold Story of Chaminade High School’s First
Undefeated and Untied Varsity Football Team.
This work is eclectic non-fiction that is honest,
humorous, politically incorrect, no-nonsense and
timely. For readers of Mansfield’s earlier books, the
stories herein may be familiar, for many of them,
like Dr. Krauthammer’s, derive from ones already
published.