Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008 - Rilegato

Leonard, John

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670023086 ISBN 13: 9780670023080

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2012

Riassunto

Right up until his death in 2008, John Leonard was a lion in American letters. A passionate, erudite, and wide-ranging critic, he helped shape the landscape of modern literature. He reviewed the most celebrated writers of his age—from Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion to Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon. He championed Morrison’s work so ardently that she invited him to travel with her to Stockholm when she accepted her Nobel Prize. He also contributed many pieces on television, film, politics, and the media, which continue to surprise and impress with their fervor and prescience.
Reading for My Life is a monumental collection of Leonard’s most significant writings—spanning five decades—from his earliest columns for the Harvard Crimson to his final essays for The New York Review of Books. Here are Leonard’s best writings—many never before published in book form—on the cultural touchstones of a generation, each piece a testament to his sharp wit, fierce intelligence, and lasting love of the arts. Definitive reviews of Doris Lessing, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Milan Kundera, and Philip Roth, among others, display his passion and nearly encyclopedic knowledge of literature in the second half of the twentieth century. His essay on Ed Sullivan and the evolution of television remains a classic. Throughout Leonard’s reviews and essays is a dedicated political spirit, pleading for social justice, advocating for the women’s movement, and forever calling attention to writers whose work challenged and excited him.
With an introduction by E. L. Doctorow and remembrances by Leonard’s friends, family, and colleagues, including Gloria Steinem and Victor Navasky, Reading for My Life stands as a landmark collection from one of America’s most beloved and influential critics.

Su questo libro

Recensione

“Leonard could write in the style of a man who has brought a scimitar to a knife fight. . . . This greatest-hits package doubles—and triples and scores—as a history of global culture and American literature, as a shadow canon and an intellectual history. . . . Because the culture has shattered—chaos, heat, fractals—Leonard’s achievement is unrepeatable.”—Troy Patterson, The Slate Book Review
“There was more than a touch of the poet in John Leonard, alongside the cheerful investigator. . . . Let's be grateful for this eloquent sample of his writings, rescued from the dust of past periodicals.”—Phillip Lopate, The New York Times Book Review
“A brilliant collection of writings on politics, social and cultural engagement and literary life. . . . Read this book for its insights into Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Michael Chabon. . . . But even more, read it for its passion, its sense that criticism can take us to the heart of everything: aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, political.”—David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
“As a writer, Leonard was often virtuosic in the vein of the New Journalism, but with more heart; as a thinker, he was both confident and aware of the follies of confidence. He could be charmingly self-deprecating, gently bemused, or (more frequently) unapologetically angry. . . . He paid his fellow writers the great compliment of his fully engaged (even if enraged) attention.”—The Boston Globe
“Nobody could write a book review like John Leonard. I don’t know if anybody ever will. . . . The essays collected here will rekindle your love of the book review - and of books themselves. . . This was how one ought to write about books . . . : with naked passion, unabashed intellectualism and, above all, that elusive, unteachable quality called grace. . . . Leonard has such a capacious mind that it could leap from television to books to the theater to the movie screen without ever so much as slipping. Above all, he endowed his words with vitality - that is the greatest lesson one can learn from his work.” —Alexander Nazaryan, The New York Daily News
“The late John Leonard was brilliant, witty, earnest, brave, erudite, stubborn, poetic and totally smitten by literature. . . . His work reflected his soul. . . . Reading for My Life . . .  remind[s] us that essays can be as diverse and creative as novels and poems — sometimes more so — and that criticism is more than just a matter of what one admires or despises. . . . At its best, criticism is a passionate engagement with another imagination.”—Julia Keller, The Chicago Tribune


“This book’s fantastic. . . . You should buy this book and have it in your life in exactly the same way you should have the Everyman edition of Orwell and Didion. . . . The thing that makes Leonard’s books such infinite things is how deeply he believed in literature.”—Kenyon Review Blog
“An excellent collection, a greatest hits of glossolalia. . . . Town crier, troubadour, and street preacher—Leonard managed to be all at once. With him, a single sentence could turn into a high-wire act.”—Liz Brown, Bookforum

“A prolific, wide-eyed, and deeply erudite observer of the passing contemporary scene, equally at home writing about sitcoms and Nobel laureates. . . . Leonard was not only a brilliant critic, he was also a superb reporter. . . . Leonard was always writing about something larger than what he was writing about. . . . His love of good writing is not only infectious, it’s also mind-expanding because his tastes were so elastic and catholic. . . . John Leonard was a writer of such consummate grace, wit, and provocation that it doesn’t matter what he settled on as his subject.”—Bill Morris, The Millions
“Great fun to read. . . . Leonard commands love and devotion.” —The Daily Beast

L'autore

John Leonard (1939-2008) was a reviewer or contributing editor for practically every national print outlet, including The Nation, the New York Review of Books, Harper's, Vanity Fair, Salon, and New York, and the daily book reviewer for the New York Times. He also appeared regularly on NPR's Fresh Air and CBS's Sunday Morning. Leonard wrote four novels and served for four years as the executive editor of the New York Times Book Review. In 2006 he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle's prestigious Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
E. L. Doctorow’s novels include The March, City of God, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Humanities Medal. E. L. Doctorow lives in New York.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0670023086
• ISBN 13: 9780670023080
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 381
• Redattore: Leonard Sue