Synopses & Reviews
Right up until his death in 2008, John Leonard was a lion in American letters. A passionate, erudite, and wide-ranging critic, he helped shape the landscape of modern literature. He reviewed the most celebrated writers of his age—from Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion to Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon. He championed Morrison’s work so ardently that she invited him to travel with her to Stockholm when she accepted her Nobel Prize. He also contributed many pieces on television, film, politics, and the media, which continue to surprise and impress with their fervor and prescience.
Reading for My Life is a monumental collection of Leonard’s most significant writings—spanning five decades—from his earliest columns for the Harvard Crimson to his final essays for The New York Review of Books. Here are Leonard’s best writings—many never before published in book form—on the cultural touchstones of a generation, each piece a testament to his sharp wit, fierce intelligence, and lasting love of the arts. Definitive reviews of Doris Lessing, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Milan Kundera, and Philip Roth, among others, display his passion and nearly encyclopedic knowledge of literature in the second half of the twentieth century. His essay on Ed Sullivan and the evolution of television remains a classic. Throughout Leonard’s reviews and essays is a dedicated political spirit, pleading for social justice, advocating for the women’s movement, and forever calling attention to writers whose work challenged and excited him.
With an introduction by E. L. Doctorow and remembrances by Leonard’s friends, family, and colleagues, including Gloria Steinem and Victor Navasky, Reading for My Life stands as a landmark collection from one of America’s most beloved and influential critics.
Review
“Leonard could write in the style of a man who has brought a scimitar to a knife fight. . . . This greatest-hits package doubles—and triples and scores—as a history of global culture and American literature, as a shadow canon and an intellectual history. . . . Because the culture has shattered—chaos, heat, fractals—Leonard’s achievement is unrepeatable.”
—Troy Patterson, The Slate Book ReviewReview
“The late John Leonard was brilliant, witty, earnest, brave, erudite, stubborn, poetic and totally smitten by literature. . . . His work reflected his soul. . . .
Reading for My Life . . . remind[s] us that essays can be as diverse and creative as novels and poems — sometimes more so — and that criticism is more than just a matter of what one admires or despises. . . . At its best, criticism is a passionate engagement with another imagination.”
—Julia Keller, The Chicago Tribune
Review
“Leonard (1939–2008), long-time reviewer for and sometime editor of the
New York Times Book Review, displays an astonishing erudition throughout these pieces. . . . There is often a playfulness—an informality—in his prose. . . . Leonard could also bring tears at unexpected moments. . . . Glistening evidence that a great critic needs both a bookworm’s habits and a capacious heart.”
—Kirkus ReviewsReview
"No one but John could bring the honor he brought—the respect, the illumination, the sheer catch-your-breath brilliance—to whatever got his attention, whether it was a book or a piece of political folly or the day's most unthinkable news. He made the connections no one else thought of making. He made the impenetrable lucid, transparent. He was quite simply our most thrilling observer."
—Joan DidionReview
"'Extraordinary' is indeed the word for that man. He did as much service to letters in this country as anyone, and he did so with a protean, omnivore's flair. We shall not see his like again."
—Richard Powers
Review
"One of the beauties of literature is that it reminds us that life is still, and always, there to be lived. John Leonard is not with us anymore, yet he's with us forever. He writes with his heart on fire. He wakes us up out of our ease. He disturbs and he soothes and he provokes. He's a gentleman. A scholar. A national treasure. Literature would not be the same without him. He understood—and therefore understands—what goes on at the coalface of language."
—Colum McCannReview
“[John Leonard’s] ecstatic, exhaustive, amassing—enthusiastic!—sentences, nestled in the pages of
The New York Review of Books or
Harper’s or
The New York Times, were a delight to me for many years. I’m even more delighted to have so many of them in one place.”—
Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, The Paris Review DailyReview
“Reading For My Life has many, many memorable high points. . . . [Leonard] had a way of taking on the big books other critics found intimidating and methodically taking them apart, often dispassionately, to see what made them tick, to lay out in front of himself the bedrock urges that sprang the thing into being in the first place. He found nothing too recondite, and he could not be cowed (he used to say he had more eyes than a housefly, and everything he saw strengthened what he knew). . . . It feels very strange, still, not to have John Leonard’s voice still going strong in the back-of-the-issue book pages of all the nation’s magazines, but this anthology is some consolation at least.”—Open Letters Monthly
Review
“Exhilarating. . . . [Leonard’s] erudition on a dizzying array of subjects--flashing like fireworks in lists that sometimes stretch to 30 or more references--is never offered for its own sake. Instead, it fuels the infectious enthusiasm of Leonard's standing invitation to join him on a roller-coaster ride in the amusement park of contemporary culture. . . . The vitality of Leonard's prose helps his incisive criticism withstand the passage of time.”
—Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf AwarenessReview
“This book’s fantastic. . . . You should buy this book and have it in your life in exactly the same way you should have the Everyman edition of Orwell and Didion. . . . The thing that makes Leonard’s books such infinite things is how deeply he believed in literature.”
—The Kenyon Review
Review
“There was more than a touch of the poet in John Leonard, alongside the cheerful investigator. . . . Let's be grateful for this eloquent sample of his writings, rescued from the dust of past periodicals.”
—Phillip Lopate, The New York Times Book ReviewReview
“A brilliant collection of writings on politics, social and cultural engagement and literary life. . . . Read this book for its insights into Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Michael Chabon. . . . But even more, read it for its passion, its sense that criticism can take us to the heart of everything: aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, political.”
—David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles TimesReview
“An excellent collection, a greatest hits of glossolalia. . . . Town crier, troubadour, and street preacher—Leonard managed to be all at once. With him, a single sentence could turn into a high-wire act.”
—Liz Brown, BookforumReview
“A bibliophile's treasure chest. . . . This book proves that there's one thing almost as good as reading books--and that's reading a book about books.”
—Ann LaFarge, The Hudson Valley NewsReview
“As a writer, Leonard was often virtuosic in the vein of the New Journalism, but with more heart; as a thinker, he was both confident and aware of the follies of confidence. He could be charmingly self-deprecating, gently bemused, or (more frequently) unapologetically angry. . . . He paid his fellow writers the great compliment of his fully engaged (even if enraged) attention.”
—The Boston GlobeReview
“Nobody could write a book review like John Leonard. I don’t know if anybody ever will. . . . The essays collected here will rekindle your love of the book review—and of books themselves. . . This was how one ought to write about books . . . : with naked passion, unabashed intellectualism and, above all, that elusive, unteachable quality called grace. . . . Leonard has such a capacious mind that it could leap from television to books to the theater to the movie screen without ever so much as slipping. Above all, he endowed his words with vitality—that is the greatest lesson one can learn from his work.”
—Alexander Nazaryan, The New York Daily NewsReview
“A prolific, wide-eyed, and deeply erudite observer of the passing contemporary scene, equally at home writing about sitcoms and Nobel laureates. . . . Leonard was not only a brilliant critic, he was also a superb reporter. . . . Leonard was always writing about something larger than what he was writing about. . . . His love of good writing is not only infectious, it’s also mind-expanding because his tastes were so elastic and catholic. . . . John Leonard was a writer of such consummate grace, wit, and provocation that it doesn’t matter what he settled on as his subject.”
—Bill Morris, The MillionsReview
“Great fun to read. . . . Leonard commands love and devotion.”
—The Daily Beast Review
“A terrific new volume. . . . John Leonard was the real deal.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh AirReview
“Books like these are where young reviewers go to learn the trade. . . . Writing about writing, Leonard always trained his attention on the single intelligence that had brought the book into being. . . . John Leonard himself was about as benevolent as such forces get.”
—Christian Lorentzen, The New York ObserverReview
“[John Leonard] was more than one of the most influential critics of our age. . . . Leonard was the critic who helped us make the most sense of postwar, midcentury American writers and their postmodern successors. His lyrical and deeply erudite reviews and essays read like ebullient jazz riffs on pages designed for tasteful adagios. To read John Leonard is to engage in a Vulcan mind-meld in which the tumble of information and insight is so one-sided as to leave the reader exhausted from the effort of pretending to hold up one's end of the conversation. His judgments never failed to exude a generosity of spirit, even while administering a much-needed slap of critical evenhandedness.”
—The Pittsburgh Post-GazetteSynopsis
John Leonard was a lion of American letters. A passionate, erudite, and wide-ranging critic, he helped shape the landscape of modern literature.
Reading for My Life is a monumental collection of Leonard's most significant writings—spanning five decades—from his earliest columns for the
Harvard Crimson to his final essays for the
New York Review of Books. Definitive reviews of Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth, among others, display Leonard's encyclopedic knowledge of literature and make this book a landmark achievement from one of America's most beloved and influential critics.
About the Author
John Leonard (1939-2008) was a reviewer or contributing editor for practically every national print outlet, including
The Nation, the
New York Review of Books,
Harper's,
Vanity Fair,
Salon, and
New York, and the daily book reviewer for the
New York Times. He also appeared regularly on NPR's
Fresh Air and CBS's
Sunday Morning. Leonard wrote four novels and served for four years as the executive editor of the
New York Times Book Review. In 2006 he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle's prestigious Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
E. L. Doctorow’s novels include The March, City of God, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Humanities Medal. E. L. Doctorow lives in New York.