"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Troy Patterson, The Slate Book 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 Review
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 Times
A terrific new volume. . . . John Leonard was the real deal.
Maureen Corrigan, NPR s Fresh Air
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 Globe
"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 Didion
"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 McCann
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 News
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, Bookforum
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 Millions
[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 Daily
"'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
Leonard (1939 2008), long-time reviewer for and sometime editor of theNew 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 Reviews
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 Awareness
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
Julia Keller, The Chicago Tribune
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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