Vincent Starrett, Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence (University of Oklahoma Press, 1965, 325 pp.) “When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” So said Vincent Starrett, the author of this memoir. I agree. I love books about books—that is, authors who write about their love of books, their collections of …Continue Reading »
Van Wyck Brooks, The World of Washington Irving (E.P. Dutton, 1944, 387 pp.) Van Wyck Brooks is an author whose work was enormously popular in the mid-20th century. How popular? Walk into any used bookstore and you’ll trip over his books. Time magazine, whose cover he graced in 1944, called him “the nation’s most distinguished …Continue Reading »
Charles Dickens, by Jane Smiley. Penguin Lives Series (Penguin, 2002, pp. 212) One of the great joys of my life that I look forward to with keen pleasure is continuing to read everything that Charles Dickens wrote. I was introduced to him about ten years ago, the way that anyone should properly be: through Great …Continue Reading »
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (Simon & Schuster, 1961; 50th Anniversary Edition, 2011, 544 pp.) Two legendary book editors spanned the length of the 20th century: Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s (1910-1947) and Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster and Knopf (1955-present). A. Scott Berg’s award-winning Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978) led me to some of …Continue Reading »
How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It by Arthur S. Herman (Crown Publishing, 2001, 472 pp.). The Enlightenment is one of my favorite periods in history, as writers and thinkers like Voltaire pushed back hard against the orthodox boundaries …Continue Reading »