Illuminating, insightful, and informative—a piquant portrait of a renegade publisher.
How a tiny startup press rocked the publishing world.
“[Barney] Rosset [1922-2012] was unquestionably the most daring and arguably the most significant American book publisher of the twentieth century.” So argues Rosenthal (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, 2006, etc.) in this short yet bright and entertaining biography. Born into a well-off Chicago family, Barney (as Rosenthal calls him) went to the finest progressive schools, where his penchant for radical beliefs emerged. After stints at colleges and the Army—where be worked in combat photography and film—the aimless young man took his love of books and some money from his father and purchased Grove Press, a small publisher with a three-book backlist. He had found his vocation. As the company’s sole employee, he quickly added to the list by picking up copyright-free classics like The Monk and The Golden Bowl. His reprint strategy soon became a steady source of income. In 1953, he married Loly, the fledging press’ sales manager, the second of his five wives, numerous girlfriends, and call girls. He could often be “scathing” and difficult to work with, and he picked the manuscripts he liked, regardless of their sales potential. In 1953, he bought the rights to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for $150. Rosset would become his sole American publisher. In 1959, he added a bright young editor/translator to the staff, Richard Seaver. Together, they tapped into Europe’s rich and complex world of literature and began picking up authors like Robbe-Grillet, Genet, and Ionesco, effectively introducing the “avant-garde into literary America’s consciousness.” Rosset had financial success in 1957 with his controversial Evergreen Review. He then took on the establishment with his costly battle to publish D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and then took on an even costlier battle to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and won again.
Illuminating, insightful, and informative—a piquant portrait of a renegade publisher.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-650-3
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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