Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others

May 15, 2018
An erudite and opinionated critic offers up a taster of tantalizing essays.Former New Yorker editor and Knopf editor-in-chief Gottlieb (Avid Reader: A Life, 2016, etc.), now approaching 90, is still keeping his writing fingers busy in the book world. This collection of previously published essays, mostly book reviews from the New York Review of Books written over the past 10 years, is divided into six sections: Lives, Letters, Music, Dance, Movies, and Observing Dance (notices about dance performances published in the New York Observer). As a book publisher for 60 years and a Farrar, Straus and Giroux author, Gottlieb assesses Boris Kachka's Hothouse, a history of the publisher. Although the book is a "vigorous and diverting trot...frequently slapdash and overwrought," it's a "valuable effort" about a press that has "maintained an amazingly consistent level of quality." Having penned biographies of George Balanchine and Sarah Bernhardt, Gottlieb is quite adept writing about music and dance. An essay on Clive Davis, the "mogul of moguls of pop music," easily rests beside the author's discussions of the "maestro," Arturo Toscanini, whom Gottlieb puts in the same category with Einstein and Picasso. Conductor Leonard Bernstein, whom Gottlieb worked with as an author, is simultaneously "legendary" and "over-the-top." The author's "In the Mood for Love" is a sprightly assessment of romance novels: "Its readership is vast, its satisfactions apparently limitless, its profitability incontestable. And where's the harm?" He rescues Ivan Goncharov's 1859 novel Oblomov, about a man who never gets out of bed, and waxes euphoric over Irishman Sebastian Barry's "luminous" novels. Gottlieb takes on an eclectic mix of subjects: Wilkie Collins, Diana Cooper, John Wilkes Booth, Mary Astor, Ethel Merman, Dorothy Parker, Esther Williams, Lorenz Hart, Maya Plisetskaya, Frank Sinatra, the "awful" film Black Swan, Setsuko Hara, an "actress like no other," and Thomas Wolfe, who "has gone over the cultural cliff."Perspicacious, penetrating, and instructive.

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Starred review from May 21, 2018
In this sterling essay collection, Gottlieb (Avid Reader), an influential editor and critic, wields words skillfully and insightfully, with razor-sharp wit and precision. He is erudite but never stuffy, and is a master of the well-placed and hilarious side comment (on criticisms that James Joyce’s Ulysses wouldn’t be understood by its own “mass man” protagonist, Leopold Bloom, he comments, “By this standard, we would condemn Lassie Come-Home because Lassie couldn’t appreciate it”). Composed mostly of critical essays for the New York Review of Books, plus a selection of dance reviews for the Observer, the collection puts notable names from a number of different artistic fields front and center, including movie star Mary Astor, author Wilkie Collins, singer Ethel Merman, choreographer Twyla Tharp, and conductor Arturo Toscanini. (The title essay is one exception, exploring books about “going to heaven” experiences, and how science might explain the near-death phenomenon; a newly relevant look at the Trump family, originally written in 2000, is another.) Gottlieb’s standards are exacting, but he gives praise where due. He’s particularly passionate about the state of dance, and makes the reader share his enthusiasm. Perhaps Gottlieb’s greatest achievement is that he inspires one to want to learn more about his subjects; his restless curiosity becomes the reader’s.

October 15, 2017

Rightly called "the most acclaimed editor of the second half of the twentieth century" by Dwight Garner of the New York Times, Gottlieb here collects nearly two dozen pieces written mostly for the New York Review of Books. They range from a study of near-death experiences to the art of the biopic to portraits of key American figures from writers Dorothy Parker and Thomas Wolfe to actor-assassin John Wilkes Booth and a prepresidential Donald Trump. A big treat for literati.

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