For lovers of literature and devotees of the New Yorker, this memoir is likely to prove endlessly captivating.
The longtime editor at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and the New Yorker thankfully breaks his vow to never write a memoir.
Born in 1931, Gottlieb (Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, 2010, etc.) grew up as an only child in Manhattan. Brainy, glib, and something of a know-it-all, he did not plan for a publishing career, but he happened into it during his 20s and quickly rocketed to the top. A perceptive reader of both fiction and nonfiction, Gottlieb understood his control-freak tendencies—partially recognized and worked through during rigorous psychoanalysis—but managed to collaborate smoothly with most of his authors and their literary agents, not to mention his bosses at all three employers. Throughout the book, the author offers countless vignettes, anecdotes, and bits of gossip, and most are positive in nature. At times, however, Gottlieb includes passages that savage authors, agents, publishers, and editors, including himself. The feast of names whose literature and/or personalities become skillfully illuminated by Gottlieb is vast and endlessly impressive: Joseph Heller, Jessica Mitford, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Julia Child, John Updike, Barbara Tuchman, Edna O'Brien, John le Carré, Ray Bradbury, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, Mordecai Richler, Chaim Potok, William Shirer, Michael Crichton, Kay Graham, Bill Clinton, Renata Adler, Gloria Vanderbilt, Lauren Bacall, Lillian Ross, William Shawn, Sonny Mehta, Lynn Nesbit, Swifty Lazar, Alfred A. Knopf, Blanche Knopf, and Si Newhouse. In addition, the author discusses his relationships with his co-workers (Michael Korda figures prominently, and almost all co-workers receive positive portrayals), parents, two wives, children, and friends. Almost incidentally, Gottlieb scatters suggestions about successful writing and editing techniques and, above all, how to maintain a productive author-editor collaboration.
For lovers of literature and devotees of the New Yorker, this memoir is likely to prove endlessly captivating.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-27992-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
IN THE NEWS
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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