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Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Unquestionably Joseph Epstein. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. How easy it is today to forget the simple delight of reading for no intended purpose. Each of the 39 pieces in this book is a pure pleasure to read.
Now with linking endnotes and index.
622 pages
Language
English
Sticky notes
On Kindle Scribe
Publisher
Axios Press
Publication date
14 September 2012
File size
11450 KB
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Review
Erudite . . . eloquent . . . opinionated . . . edifying and often very entertaining.--Publishers Weekly, July 2012
Mr. Epstein's essays are brilliant distillations . . . [which] bring to biography a genius of discernment.--Carl Rollyson "The Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2012 "
The acclaimed essayist . . . presents a provocative collection of essays that [are] . . . guaranteed to both delight and disconcert.--Kirkus, July 2012
The joys of reading Joseph Epstein are many. . . . Readers consistently find wit, whimsy, and learning at the most accessible and enjoyable level.--Larry Thornberry "The American Spectator, October 1, 2012 "
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Joseph Epstein is a long time resident of Chicago. Joseph Epstein has taught English and writing at Northwestern for many years. He is the author of 22 books, many of them collections of essays, and has also written for numerous magazines including the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Commentary. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Product details
ASIN : B009D13TEG
Publisher : Axios Press (14 September 2012)
Language : English
File size : 11450 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
Print length : 622 pages
===
Washington Posts
Opinions
“Essays in biography” by Joseph Epstein
By Jonathan Yardley
October 20, 2012
Over a writing career of nearly four decades, Joseph Epstein has published various collections of what he likes to call “familiar essays,” usually on literary subjects. His agreeably approachable and fluid prose no doubt is the result of invisible but careful labor, his opinions are tart and confidently expressed, he seems to have read just about everything and quotes from that reading with daunting authority. On the other hand, he affects modesty but appears to possess little of it; he dances a fine line between amiability and smugness and occasionally lands on the wrong side of it.
“Essays in Biography,” which by my count is his 12th essay collection (as well as his 23rd book), is typical of his work in that each of its 40 pieces is smart, witty and a pleasure to read. It also is a rather strange book that only intermittently lives up to the promise in its title. Since no foreword or afterword is provided, only a list (without dates) of the seven publications in which the essays originally appeared, it is left to the reader to guess as to the provenance of the pieces, but many of them appear to be book reviews — of biographies, memoirs or other books about the lives of mostly notable people. But his present publisher has tried to inflate them into studies in biography, which they simply are not.
That Epstein has allowed himself to be published by Axios is, in and of itself, not a little strange. Axios is the publishing wing of the Axios Institute, which gives every evidence of being a feel-good think tank or research institute, and which in its “Mission Statement” rattles on at modest length about “values” — “Values refers to objects, states of being, ideas, ways of thinking, or people that we value or do not value and related beliefs, assumptions or attitudes about what is valuable or not valuable” — in ways that strike me as almost diametrically opposite to the skeptical, sardonic view that Epstein is inclined to take toward human self-improvement schemes. Indeed, Axios has recently published “Desires, Right & Wrong: The Ethics of Enough,” by Mortimer J. Adler, the late pop philosopher and “Great Books” propagandist whom Epstein kissed off in a memorable obituary for the Weekly Standard as “The Great Bookie.” Now, under the aegis of Axios, the two are bedfellows, albeit mighty strange ones.
Oh well, these are tough times for books and the people who write them, so any port in a storm. I do hope, though, that Epstein is privately embarrassed by the over-hyped jacket copy with which his new book is festooned: “Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Unquestionably, it is Joseph Epstein. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard-to-define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. . . . How easy it is, in today’s digital age, drowning in e-mails and other ephemera, to forget the simple delight of reading for no intended purpose!” So be sure to have no purpose in mind when you sit down with “Essays in Biography.”
Internal evidence suggests that what seems to be the earliest of these pieces, about Henry Luce, was originally published in the late 1960s. The essay is fine as far as it goes in discussing the journalistic empire that brought forth Time, Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated, People and other contributions to the general weal, but those magazines have changed enormously (or, in the case of Life, simply died except for occasional special issues) since Epstein’s piece first appeared, and no effort has been made to bring the essay up to date and take those changes into consideration. I am old enough to remember all too well Time in the glory years about which Epstein writes, and even to have done a number of book reviews for Sports Illustrated during the 1970s, but younger readers will be more puzzled than enlightened by the well-aimed darts that Epstein sticks into Time’s ghastly prose style and Luce’s preoccupation with what he liked to call “the American Century.”
‘Essays in Biography" by Joseph Epstein (Axios)
Epstein serves the reader (and himself) far better when he turns to subjects that have more staying power than does a journalist-editor-publisher who, no matter how famous and powerful during his lifetime, is now almost completely forgotten. Epstein’s remarkable capacity to fetch from his memory the exactly appropriate quotation is on view, for example, in a piece about Henry James and Henry Adams, contemporaries who had to acknowledge each other’s existence but fundamentally did not like each other. Adams’s wife, Clover, Epstein reminds us, “said of Henry James that, as a novelist, he ‘chews more than he bites off,’ ” which is literary sniping at its most deliciously malicious, while James “said of the Adamses that they preferred Washington to London because ‘they are, vulgarly speaking, “someone” here and . . . they are nothing’ in England.” In a piece about George Santayana (who is probably now forgotten outside university philosophy departments), Epstein lays low almost an entire breed:
“What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world’s evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of the philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.”
Epstein goes in a similar direction when writing about Irving Howe, who as a young man wrote that World War II was “between two great imperialist camps,” a truly preposterous view that reminds Epstein “of George Orwell’s famous crack that there are certain things one has to be an intellectual to believe, since no ordinary man could be so stupid.” He takes the phenomenally overrated Susan Sontag to the woodshed, correctly pointing out that “all her political views were left-wing commonplace, noteworthy only because of her extreme statement of them.” As this indicates, Epstein takes a dim view of leftist ideological orthodoxy, as well he should, but it would be interesting to hear him on the subject of the rightist ideological orthodoxy that is now playing havoc with the American political system. His own conservatism appears to be rooted in conviction and experience rather than self-interested anger, and indeed he is capable of generosity toward some on the other side of the divide whom the tea party doubtless would revile:
“A special feeling continues to surround [Adlai] Stevenson’s name even after his death. His claim to be remembered as more than a period politician surely rests on the striking effect he has had on a large segment of the American electorate. Stevenson is inextricably tied up with the aspirations of a great many Americans for a better world in which America will have an honorable place — and rightly so, for these were also Adlai Stevenson’s aspirations. He was a fundamentally decent man in a political climate where decency was a rare commodity. Yet these same qualities, because unalloyed with any strong political vision or original political program, finally ended in crippling him.”
All of which is true, as is Epstein’s considerably less-generous judgment of another gentleman of the left, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., whose posthumously published journals give painful evidence of his “infatuation — adoration is a more precise word” — with the Kennedy family: “First Jack, then Bobby, ultimately the entire clan — Schlesinger seems never to have met a Kennedy he did not adore. The result, as even he seems vaguely to grasp, would be the ruin of his reputation as a serious historian.”
Apart from politicians, Epstein has admiring things to say about some of his fellow writers, perhaps most notably in an acutely perceptive essay about Ralph Ellison, and rather less admiring things about others, among them Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal. He has a keen nose for anti-Semitism and brings it to light whenever he finds it, at times to the detriment of otherwise admirable people. It does not seem to me that he is consistently at the top of his form in this collection, as some of these pieces are rather perfunctory and some are dated, but it gives pleasure all the same.
yardleyj@washpost.com
ESSAYS IN BIOGRAPHY
By Joseph Epstein
Axios. 603 pp. $24
===
Top reviews
geoff spencer
5.0 out of 5 stars BITING BUT FAIRReviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on 11 March 2013
Verified Purchase
Joseph Epstein has a deceptively simple techique for writing a book: he reads the definitive biographies someone else has written, filters it through his own perception, and puts the result on paper. It's a kind off double analysis, without fancy trimmings. Above all, it's interesting and readable, and the writing style impeccable. Very few of today's writers handle the Queen's English with such reverence. The subject range is wide, and there a few I could have done without, Xenophon and Michael Jordan, for example. I'm surprised that if he could include A.J. Liebling digging his grave with a fork that he didn't find room for Dorothy Parker and H.L. Mencken. However, a good book like this deserves no further quibbles. Perfect bedside reading. Nibble and nod.
2 people found this helpfulReport abuse
Richard Nason
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent writing of slices of biographyReviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on 1 May 2016
Verified Purchase
This is a book best savored in little bits. The writing is excellent, the insights are generally also excellent, but not always so. Buy for the writing and the joy of reading slices of biography.
Report abuse
Marty Nemko
5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite essayist, but too many of the biogiraphies are about writers
Top reviews
geoff spencer
5.0 out of 5 stars BITING BUT FAIRReviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on 11 March 2013
Verified Purchase
Joseph Epstein has a deceptively simple techique for writing a book: he reads the definitive biographies someone else has written, filters it through his own perception, and puts the result on paper. It's a kind off double analysis, without fancy trimmings. Above all, it's interesting and readable, and the writing style impeccable. Very few of today's writers handle the Queen's English with such reverence. The subject range is wide, and there a few I could have done without, Xenophon and Michael Jordan, for example. I'm surprised that if he could include A.J. Liebling digging his grave with a fork that he didn't find room for Dorothy Parker and H.L. Mencken. However, a good book like this deserves no further quibbles. Perfect bedside reading. Nibble and nod.
2 people found this helpfulReport abuse
Richard Nason
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent writing of slices of biographyReviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on 1 May 2016
Verified Purchase
This is a book best savored in little bits. The writing is excellent, the insights are generally also excellent, but not always so. Buy for the writing and the joy of reading slices of biography.
Report abuse
Marty Nemko
5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite essayist, but too many of the biogiraphies are about writers
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 24 July 2021
Verified Purchase
Intelligent, with subtie humor, in richly describing a few dozen luminaries. Not surprising given his being a writer that he profiles a disproportionate number of writers, but that's but a venial sin. The book contains, for example, an insightful look at Adlai Stevenson and why he didn't win the presidency. Epstein is a true moderate. Today he'd be called a conservative.
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Joel
5.0 out of 5 stars Very entertaining
Verified Purchase
Intelligent, with subtie humor, in richly describing a few dozen luminaries. Not surprising given his being a writer that he profiles a disproportionate number of writers, but that's but a venial sin. The book contains, for example, an insightful look at Adlai Stevenson and why he didn't win the presidency. Epstein is a true moderate. Today he'd be called a conservative.
Report abuse
Joel
5.0 out of 5 stars Very entertaining
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 16 January 2020
Verified Purchase
Excellent writing by Epstein as expected. Parts of it were a little too gossipy.
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W. R. Nelson
5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant, enlightening and entertaining- all in one book!
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Excellent writing by Epstein as expected. Parts of it were a little too gossipy.
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W. R. Nelson
5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant, enlightening and entertaining- all in one book!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 9 January 2013
Verified Purchase
I've long enjoyed Mr. Epstein's essays in the Wall Street Journal, as well as some of his other books (e.g., Snobbery and Friendship, an Expose), but this volume is an exceptionally good read. I liked it so much that I gave Kindle versions of the book as Christmas gifts to some "impossible to buy for" friends with happy results.
Epstein covers a wide range of notable people in this book with both insight and humor. I found that even when I might not agree with his take on certain people, his viewpoint challenged my own "take" on those people such that I often walked away with new insights.
Well worth your time.
15 people found this helpfulReport abuse
Verified Purchase
I've long enjoyed Mr. Epstein's essays in the Wall Street Journal, as well as some of his other books (e.g., Snobbery and Friendship, an Expose), but this volume is an exceptionally good read. I liked it so much that I gave Kindle versions of the book as Christmas gifts to some "impossible to buy for" friends with happy results.
Epstein covers a wide range of notable people in this book with both insight and humor. I found that even when I might not agree with his take on certain people, his viewpoint challenged my own "take" on those people such that I often walked away with new insights.
Well worth your time.
15 people found this helpfulReport abuse
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Goodreads
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Essays in Biography
Joseph Epstein
3.96
125 ratings26 reviews
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Carl Rollyson
Author
133 books
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October 29, 2012
Joseph Epstein is one of the best essayists in contemporary American letters. A traditionalist who adopts a wary view of literary trends and personalities, he takes no prisoners when confronting unwarranted reputations. Here is how his review of Sigrid Nunez's memoir of Susan Sontag begins: "Susan Sontag, as F.R. Leavis said of the Sitwells, belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity." Not only has Sontag been put in her place, that place is among literary predecessors who have made spectacles of themselves. Mr. Epstein is, in some respects, a throwback to the Leavis era, with its touting of a "great tradition" in literature. But Mr. Epstein is not a throwback insofar as he is constantly engaged with the present and with an impressive array of subjects: from Malcolm Gladwell to George Washington, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Joe DiMaggio "Essays in Biography" is divided into sections on Americans (the largest), Englishmen, popular culture and "Others." He could have included an entire section devoted to critics, since he has pieces on Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and James Wolcott.
Mr. Epstein's ability to capture a subject in a memorable 3,000 words should be the envy of biographers, who write at greater length but sometimes with no greater effect. Biographies are vats of facts that take patience to digest; Mr. Epstein's essays are brilliant distillations. Biographers are rarely as nimble and pithy as he can be, and they labor under constraints he would surely chafe at. Indeed, the author once returned the advance for a biography of John Dos Passos that he had agreed to write, an enterprise that would surely have taxed his desire to say what he really thinks.
What? Biographers don't say what they think? A biography—whatever its rewards—usually comes complete with shackles. Biographers have opinions, but bald judgments are usually eschewed. The biography of Susan Sontag that I co-wrote ("Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon") could not have begun with Mr. Epstein's first sentence; it would have been called tendentious and worse. The biographical narrative is supposed to unfold without editorializing, and most biographers will say it isn't their place to judge but to understand—although Mr. Epstein might counter that judgment is a form of understanding.
The value Mr. Epstein brings to biography is an incisive grasp of person and prose. This acuity comes out in his review of Saul Bellow's letters. Mr. Epstein knew Bellow and was in a position to observe the touchy novelist's interactions with friends. As a result, the review comes to life as both criticism and biography: "Saul had two valves on his emotional trumpet: intimacy and contempt." Here, too, a biographer can only gasp at the freedom accorded the essayist, as when he notes the "con in much of Bellow's correspondence." Mr. Epstein thinks "Herzog" works so well because of the letters the title character writes to all sorts of addressees, concluding that, "in some ways," the letter was Bellow's "true métier." This is the setup for a devastating verdict: Bellow was not "truly a novelist." He had ideas but no stories and could not shape a narrative, ending up with the "high-octane riffs" of a "philosophical schmoozer."
Mr. Epstein is to be prized for his ability to stand back from the biographical field, so to speak, while taking aboard the insights of biographers. He brings to biography what he calls "the amateur view" in an essay on George Washington, in which he draws on historians like Barry Schwartz and Gordon S. Wood. Mr. Epstein cites a chapter from Lord Bryce's "The American Commonwealth" called "Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents" and embarks on an extended meditation on just why it is not quite so easy to determine if Washington was a great man.
Bryce asserts that the American voter does not mind settling for mediocrity and actually prefers someone who is safe over someone with an original or profound mind. Of Washington, Mr. Epstein asks: "Was he an authentically great man, or instead merely the right man for his time?" He then canvasses opinions about our first president, beginning with Thomas Jefferson's mixed review: Washington was not an agile thinker, proved a cautious and not particularly quick improviser as a general, and though a man of integrity and forceful leadership, had a habit of exactly calculating "every man's value." Mr. Epstein implies that historian Forrest McDonald came close to suggesting Washington was a myth that the country needed to believe in.
Perhaps only Mr. Epstein would then refer to "Pride and Prejudice," comparing the reader's tendency to identify with Elizabeth Bennet, because she is left undescribed, to Americans' desire to read into Washington traits the country most covets. Then comes a classic Epstein formulation: "Washington was famous even before he was great, monumental while still drawing breath, apotheosized while still very much alive." In 19 words, Mr. Epstein builds a biographical schema that does not have to be labored over for 300 pages.
The essayist concludes that Washington's greatness inheres in his moral character, in his "genius for discerning right action." Something similar might be said about Joseph Epstein, who brings to biography a genius of discernment that is expressed in the just and moral character of his prose.
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Joan Colby
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46 books
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December 12, 2013
Joseph Epstein must be acknowledged as the supreme essayist of our time. In this book, he tackles individuals ranging from George Washington to Alfred Kinsey and various in between with his customary combination of erudition and elan. Many of these essays honor and admire their subjects, a few skin them alive. I particularly enjoyed the profiles of Washington, Santayana, Bellow, Malamud, Max Beerbohm, T.S. Eliot, George Gershwin and Erich Heller.
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Lauren Albert
1,797 reviews
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October 21, 2012
I've read all of Epstein's essay collections and this was the one I have liked least. He wears his biases on his sleeve here--something that annoys me regardless of whether I agree with them or not. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that his humor was not as evident here as in his other collections.
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John
227 reviews
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March 25, 2017
The biographer's curse is to never really get across everything they might wish to say about their subject. Fortunately, Joseph Epstein is not a carrier of this curse. Requiring only 10-15 pages per subject, the reader of Essays in Biography is allowed an interesting, critical, and enlightening look into a plethora of individuals of differing character, abilities, and contributions to society.
With a cast as diverse as George Washington, Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, and Xenophon, there really is enough in this volume for any reader to enjoy, especially one that enjoys refreshingly honest and direct writing. Epstein is a uniquely talented writer of essays. Many of these essays, written across the decades of his career, begin as book reviews, and thus allow us not just to see Epstein's opinion of the person he is writing about, but also to see his thoughts on the perception of his subject. With this in mind, I've learned a great deal of new and absorbing information about people I'd know of, (like Adlai Stevenson, Arthur Schlesinger, T.S. Eliot, Alfred Kinsey, or Joe Dimaggio), and learned for the first time about characters like Susan Sontag, Henry Luce, Maurice Bowra, and Hugh Trevor-Roper.
The most elegant and carefully written essays were on some of Epstein's friends, including John Frederick Nims, John Gross, and Matthew Shanahan. The essay on Shanahan, an unknown, blind, older gentleman from Chicago that Epstein befriended when Shanahan was in his eighties and has since died, was a very touching account that shows the emotional range that Epstein can write in. It can be compared with his driving critique of Susan Sontag to convey Epstein's ability to be unbelievably kind when dealing with those he sees as noble (and one is led to agree) and to be bitingly critical of those he sees as falling short (again, one is forced to agree with his analysis). I learned a great deal about life, about the literary world, about the impact of Jewish writers on America's collective literary tradition, and about what it means to carefully judge someone's impact on the world. A very good collection of essays from a splendid writer.
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Timothy Swarr
21 reviews
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January 18, 2019
Joseph Epstein’s breadth of interests, concise prose, and thorough topical analysis (often accomplished in surprisingly, and refreshingly, few pages) is always enough to keep me engaged and entertained as a reader. Whatever, or whoever, the subject, Professor Epstein can reliably command my attention to his writing.
The essays in this collection contain few exceptions to this. However, I occasionally felt that the title to this book should instead be Essays from Biographies, rather than Essays in Biography. Several of the essays read like slightly detached summaries of the scholarly biographies that, upon the author’s reading them, inspired their creation. Just when summary seems poised to give way to extended personal criticism, the essays often seem to end abruptly, with a page or two of slightly shallow authorial evaluation of the essay’s subject tacked on in conclusion.
Professor Epstein is clearly at his best when writing either about his own history or about those persons he’s directly met and known, and this is perhaps best demonstrated by the strength of the final essay on the only non-celebrity, Matthew Shanahan, in this collection. Professor Epstein portrays Mr. Shanahan, a retired post office employee and personal friend of the author, as richly and realistically as any of the high profile, cultural titans discussed elsewhere in the text.
In the end, I finished this collection with my curiosity for many of the subjects written about both satisfied on an elementary level and aroused to further, more focused future study. I think this is what the author most intended: for his readers to have enough of a taste of the life at the center of each essay to decide whether one wants to learn more about it. As an occasionally uneven biographical sampler, this work ultimately succeeds.
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Kyle
226 reviews
170 followers
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March 12, 2018
Joseph Epstein's "Essays in Biography" functions partly as literary criticism, partly as revisionist accounts of the 42 lives under review. Each chapter is devoted to a different person of interest (a political, cultural, or historical figure--41 of them male, 1 female) and his/her biographer. The writing is pointed, witty, often poetic, and highly opinionated. There are a few patterns I noticed throughout the book: 1. If Epstein personally knew the person he writes about, they are almost always viewed favorably UNLESS that person spoke ill towards the essayist. 2. The most polarizing essays are the funnest to read (positives TS Eliot, Michael Jordan vs. negatives Malcolm Gladwell, Saul Bellow). 3. If a subject has made statements about his/her minority status that are not simply self deprecating, Epstein tends to react negatively & uses it against them.
Overall, his book was an interesting twist on the literary form and I enjoyed learning about his subjects (most of whom I hadn't heard of before). He does have a knack at describing the essence of a person in just a few pages; the best examples are Malcolm Gladwell, Ralph Ellison, and Matthew Shanahan. To me, however, several chapters were lukewarm & just uninteresting, even with Epstein's first-rate style. A few chapters were compiled from various publications (New Yorker, Washington Post, etc.), so it's understandable why a publisher would simply want to publish a full compilation. However, omitting ~20% of the book would have made it the perfect length for me.
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Phil Gates
25 reviews
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January 4, 2021
Although these essays are literate and often witty, I don't recommend this collection. Its essays are frequently thin and mean spirited. They feel more like rhetorical exercises in support of political and cultural postures than instructive accounts of a life well - or ill - lived. They reveal more about what the author feels about the subject than how and why the subject lived as s/he did. Consequently they have a way of showing more about how the author wants to be known than about how the subject might usefully be understood. Since it is identified as essays in biography I was expecting more of the latter.
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Joe
50 reviews
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June 28, 2020
Fascinating to read about Ralph Ellison.
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Mark Mallah
11 reviews
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January 5, 2023
Epstein is a master essayist and stylist. There are no extra words, each one flows so smoothly you can just lose yourself on an effortless and rewarding journey without even trying.
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Mike
395 reviews
33 followers
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January 2, 2013
Informed and pleasurable writing. Will read more of his work. Gives many reading ideas. Beautiful dedication.
notes, quotes
33..H adams & h James...adams availed himself of that opiate of the rich and bored: travel--exotic, almost relentless travel
41..santayana..read at morn, as reward..detachment..serenity..a calming effect
47..S.'s Letters, 48-52...holzberger editor (READ)
not possessing things nor being possessed by them
147..Prufrock parody: grow old, grow old, grow cold
156..rosenfeld..1949 Commentary, keeping kosher the reason for Jewish repression of sexuality...Kashruth should be permitted only to Hasidim
165..Bellow: no storyteller...touchy
180..Malamud leitmotif, life is sad
184..THE FIXER (plus A Bates movie)
185..The Assistant 1957..based on the honorable sadness of his father's life in his hardscrabble Brooklyn grocery store
239..Kazin..allergic to contentment
241..women satisfying themselves upon me as if I were a bedpost
244..the other side of sentimentality is often brutality (wife beating)
249..irving Kristol..a genius of temperament
272..Liebling unable to follow the sensible regimen of his idol Col. Stingo, who proclaimed: I have 3 rules of keeping in condition. I will not let guileful women move in on me, I decline all responsibility, and I shun EXACTIOUS LUXURIES, lest I become their slave.
279..John F Nims...terrific guy...READ him
285..sontag..the type that Lenin called "useful idiot"..n vietnam visit: white race is the cancer of human history.
re 9-11: america had it coming
286..santayana, Germans are utterly devoid of the emotion of boredom
294..beerbohm: N John Hall: MAX B, A KIND OF LIFE
when explaining a motive, "i may be wrong", or "But these are merely biographer's fancies"...a refreshing and admirable casualness
298..claimed to lack envy and ambition, wanting only to "make good use of such little talents as I had, to lead a pleasant life, to do no harm, to pass muster."
315..M Bowra (gay), when told the woman he was courting was a lesbian, "Buggers can't be choosers"
335..Eliot: I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
381..John Gross: literary editor, hilite TLS 74-81
Shylock: 400 yrs in the life of a legend 1992..READ
387..the truth may be that John hadn't the egotism and vanity, the pushiness and self-absorption, required of the true writer. (Please not to ask how I know about these requisite qualities.) HA!
412..charles van doren..."21"
Movie Quiz Show portrayed corruption of capitalism, but men of integrity shut them down, under the existing capitalist order
415..detached self-contentment
WC Fields
429..one of the great comic voices of all time
431..2 characters, hi-toned grouchy con man, and the greatly put-upon husband, or "sucker"
Its a Gift, 1934
441..I Thalberg, considered actors a species of children
465..Dimaggio despised Kennedy's & Clinton as sexual predators
482..James Wolcott: overwrought prose..slathers lavishly on all subjects..full of false energy and sloppy phrasing
Didion's current professional mourner phase
491..M Gladwell..rubbish
505..erich heller..1911-1990 READ
507...a good listener, which is rare for a professor(among profs, there is no listening--only waiting)
praising; Mann...refered to praise as Vitamin P, and preferred to take it in large doses
Never a complainer,..lashed to O2 & IV-feeding machine, fatigued by emphysema, contemplating life without health, "I suppose it's not really worth it"..But then, the student of German philosophy right up to the end, added "the will overrode the capacity for reasoning, and so one lived on."
544..Xenophon..the goodness of his humor, and his constant cheerfulness and playfulness of temper, always free from anything of moroseness or haughtiness, made him more attractive even to his old age, than themost beautiful and youthful men of the nation.
556..My Friend Matt...lovely..
558..a set of stds and values bred by the Depression and WWII that seemed to be on their way out.
563..Matt played on thru blindness, old age, felt life closing in on him, and kept his poise, humor, and high spirits.
