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LIFE IN CULTURE

Name: LIFE IN CULTURE
Author: Lionel Trilling
ISBN: 978-0-374-18515-2

SELECTED LETTERS OF LIONEL TRILLING

by Lionel Trilling ; edited by Adam Kirsch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2018

Thin-skinned Trilling may have been, but this epistolary interior monologue shows the defensiveness of a restless and...

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A generous sampling of letters that displays the rich intellectual life of mid-20th-century America’s leading critic as well as his staunchly even temperament and many second thoughts.

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) led a seriously busy life. These letters, edited by poet and critic Kirsch (The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature, 2016, etc.), show a famous and popular Columbia University professor constantly pressed for time between classes, meetings, and books. They also reveal a man equally consumed by self-doubt and the fear that no one really understood his variously nuanced, ironic, or radically moderate positions. He hated extremes. He was attracted to communism but despised Stalinism; he sympathized with Trotsky but bristled at Trotskyism. In a dispute with Marxist critic Eric Bentley, he wrote, “I am no longer sure that I am, in any sense, in any accepted sense of the word, a leftist.” For all his honors, Trilling wasn’t sure he was even in the right job. “Fiction is what I always had in mind and maybe I’m ready for it,” he wrote to critic Newton Arvin in 1942. Six years later, he told novelist John Crowe Ransom, “I always feel that I made myself a critic on a dare to myself at twenty and because I had been such a maundering idiot at college: and now I’m bewildered and even embarrassed when I’m taken seriously!” The public had other ideas. Trilling’s 1947 novel, The Middle of the Journey, gave him immense satisfaction but only middling notices (all of which he answered with multiple corrections). His essay collection The Liberal Imagination sold more than 100,000 copies in paperback.

Thin-skinned Trilling may have been, but this epistolary interior monologue shows the defensiveness of a restless and meticulous mind, wary of easy answers and labels and astute about matching the right word to the precise shade of thought.

Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-374-18515-2

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT
by Lionel Trilling & edited by Leon Wieseltier

- BOOK REVIEW
SPEAKING OF LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
by Lionel Trilling & edited by Diana Trilling

- BOOK REVIEW
OF THIS TIME, OF THAT PLACE AND OTHER STORIES
by Lionel Trilling

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.