Based on Reading for My Life, an exhilarating selection of 50 John Leonard reviews, essays and speeches (culled from, by his own estimate, a five-million-word career), it's possible to believe the critic read every one of the 13,000 books Leonard once calculated, with a tinge of regret, were the most even a reader as avid as he might hope to consume in a lifetime. But his 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.
Reading for My Life contains a healthy sampling from nearly all of the many publications that featured Leonard's work (of how many writers can it be said they wrote happily for National Review and the Nation?). There are brief reviews of novels from authors like Don DeLillo and Doris Lessing, and extended appraisals of the works of Gunter Grass, Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer and others, alongside reviews of nonfiction that include memoirs as diverse as Richard Nixon's Six Crises and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Throughout, the vitality of Leonard's prose helps his incisive criticism withstand the passage of time.
Leonard, who for 16 years had a weekly spot on CBS Sunday Morning, didn't consider it slumming to cover the world of television. Among the most engaging pieces in the book are expansive essays like "Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins," mourning the erosion of our cultural consensus, or "Family Values, Like the House of Atreus," deploring the vapid depiction of family life on network television ("TV, like fairy tales and structuralism, is how we dream out loud about ourselves"). But Leonard didn't confine himself to cultural criticism--literary or otherwise. In his politics, he was a committed liberal, as demonstrated by his informed, passionate essays on why socialism never came to the United States and America's response to the 9/11 attacks, among others.
Reading for My Life concludes with a series of warmhearted tributes from family and friends like Toni Morrison and Victor Navasky, all paying homage to a man who married a keen intelligence to a generous spirit. "The books we love, love us back," John Leonard once wrote. There is wisdom, wit, and yes, ample helpings of love in the words gathered here--a celebratory summing up of an incomparable critic's life's work. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: A career-spanning collection of an eminent critic's takes on literature, culture and politics.