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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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