No blindingly brilliant insights into the seismic changes that have transformed publishing but an agreeable memoir that...
The evolving nature of the book business over the past half-century, as experienced in one up-and-down career.
When Harper & Row published Godwin’s (Flora, 2013, etc.) first novel in 1970, publishing houses were still relatively genteel places. The author had a personal relationship with her editor there and a long-term one with Knopf’s Bob Gottlieb, who published her next four books but lost her to Viking when he didn’t offer enough money for A Mother and Two Daughters, which proved to be her breakout best-seller. Godwin has nothing against commerce, which makes her a measured observer of the “next era of publishing,” which began for her when she lunched with Penguin CEO Peter Mayer four days after he fired the president of Penguin subsidiary Viking. In the increasingly corporate publishing world, she writes, “I was one of the many authors to be caught in the tumult while it thrashed about in search of a new business model.” Despite A Southern Family’s success for Morrow-Avon, she found “the new publishing ethos was firmly in place” when she submitted Father Melancholy’s Daughter in 1990. The text and title were both judged too long; Carolyn Reidy (Avon’s president) said it wouldn’t earn out its advance. Reidy was right, and when The Good Husband also failed to earn out for Random House, Godwin returned part of the advance to pay for ads and hired her own publicist for Evensong and several subsequent books. And so it has gone for writers in the 21st century, when, fellow novelist Caroline Leavitt told Godwin, “an author has to brand herself.” The author is more bemused than outraged by these developments; her engaging memoir, similarly, is interesting primarily for its mildly gossipy anecdotes about various publishing executives and glimpses of stories begun and abandoned or morphing into other novels.
No blindingly brilliant insights into the seismic changes that have transformed publishing but an agreeable memoir that captures its pleasures and pitfalls.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1620408247
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
PERSPECTIVES
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 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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