A Lifetime Burning

 

This is a book that I couldn't put down until I neared the end--at which point I slowed my pace because I couldn't stand the thought of finishing it.

Kazin wrote about his own life with straightforward self-aware honest clarity. And he wrote about others with insight and, for the most part, sympathy. He wrote about literature as one poet to another. He was an Emersonian reader--moreso, I think, than Harold Bloom (who claimed Emerson among his precursors).