Intelligent, thoughtful, and deliciously gossipy: a must for anyone interested in book publishing.
Charming WWII-era letters exchanged by the founders of Random House.
Both men were too old to be drafted (Cerf was 43 in 1942, Klopfer 40), but their correspondence sparkles with the youthful joie de vivre of people who love their work. Quiet, modest Klopfer writes only a little about his service as an intelligence officer in England; the letters mainly concern Random House business, discussed by Cerf with the ebullience familiar to readers of his popular humor books and the memoir At Random (1977). They describe book publishing in its pre-corporate heyday, when selling 100,000 copies of a new title like Guadalcanal Diary was a huge achievement, and maintaining the backlist was still a primary concern for a hardcover publisher. The winds of change are in the air, though, as Random snaps up a major interest in Grosset & Dunlap, snatching it away from hated rival Simon & Schuster because Cerf can see that in the future making a “package offer” to authors including paperback and book club deals will provide a crucial commercial edge. His partner was less sanguine about these developments. “Will Random House be any fun at all as a ‘big business’ instead of our very personal venture?” he writes in 1944. We can see how personal relations were among the staff, as Cerf recounts marital breakups, alcohol-soaked dinners, and weekends by the pool with key members of the Random team. The extended running joke concerning the men’s secretary, nicknamed “Jezebel”—her supposed love for fur coats, her bosses’ alleged lust for her—will strike many modern readers as sexist and patronizing, but the intent is so obviously affectionate that they’ll be inclined to forgive this manifestation of another generation’s attitudes. Klopfer’s and Cerf’s deep love for each other permeates every page of this delightful book to make it a moving record of friendship as well as an illuminating snapshot of American cultural history.
Intelligent, thoughtful, and deliciously gossipy: a must for anyone interested in book publishing.Pub Date: March 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50768-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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