Adam Gopnik Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Adam Gopnik

The most exuberant, erotic history of the French Enlightenment. Mitford is disapproved of by sterner academics, though she has the most instinctive grasp of the crazily competitive French intellectual life.

Adam Gopnik

When I saw the London revue "Side By Side By Sondheim" in 1977, it changed my life. His art goes on changing it. Herewith, some memories, a few criticky scruples, a curtain call of gratitude for his existence. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/farewell-to-stephen-sondheim

Adam Gopnik

Can't recommend this book too much. It fell on me out of the blue and was so dense with aphoristic wit and wisdom, forgive the cliche, that it was entirely irresistible. A conservative mind with a liberal heart. Beautiful translation, too.

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Adam Gopnik

The best and most entertaining biography ever written in English — addictive for its prescient, informal, racy prose and Johnson's epigrammatic precision and enduring decency.

Adam Gopnik

Excellent ... Stevens, in Camera Man takes an original and, in a way, more distanced approach to Keaton ... Stevens offers a series of pas de deux between Keaton and other personages of his time, who shared one or another of his preoccupations or projects.

Adam Gopnik

One particular gift of Bloemink’s biography is that it presents the vers-libre poetry that Stettheimer wrote alongside her paintings, and shows that her verse, though produced without the immense technical care that she poured into her visual art, is in its way just as remarkable

Adam Gopnik

Excellent ... An immense year-by-year, sometimes week-by-week, account of Keaton as an artist and a man. Every detail of his life and work is here, starting with his birth ... Curtis is particularly good on the early years.

Adam Gopnik

The story of how Robinson braved bigotry to break the color line is heroic, but it shouldn’t distract from the cruel absurdity of there having been a color line to be broken...The petty cruelties of American racism are a permanently depressing subject.

Adam Gopnik

Though Updike is not a writer of happy subjects — the pains of marriage, the loss of time — he makes readers happy by the sheer perfection of his craft and his deep delight in the sensual surface of the world. He sings, and we harmonize.

Adam Gopnik

Kevin Baker...tells stories about the development of baseball, many of them involving the Polo Grounds, and, as with earlier baseball bards, the narratives come complete with morals. But his have a harder, more disabused edge than the familiar sporting sort.