The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.89 (895 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0399174591 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 416 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-02-26 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
His most recent editing project, Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte, was a New York Times bestseller. . As editor of The Washington Post Magazine, he conceived and edited two Pulitzer Prize winning feature stories. Tom Shroder is an award-winning journalist, editor, and author of Old Souls and Acid Test, a transform
In The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived, Shroder revisits the past--Kantor's upbringing, his early life, and career trajectory--and writes not just the life story of one man but a meditation on fame, family secrets and legacies, and what is remembered after we are gone.. A veteran of the Washington Post and Miami Herald among others, Shroder has made a career of investigative journalism and human-interest stories, from interviewing South American children who claim to have memories of past lives for his book Old Souls, to a former Marine suffering from debilitating PTSD and his doctor who is pioneering a successful psychedelic drug treatment in Acid Test. Shroder's most fascinating reporting, however, comes from within his own family: his grandfather, MacKinlay Kantor, was the world-famous author of Andersonville, the seminal novel of the Civil War. As a child, Shroder was in awe of the larger-than-life character. H
A unique and memorable literary family history This is the story of a famous writer and an often unlikable man, written by his less famous grandson who may be a better writer and certainly is a better man. When Tom Shroder was young, the work of his grandfather, the Pulitzer Prize winning author MacKinlay Kantor, seemed about as hip and relevant as war bonds and Perry Como. But when Shroder matured and began to explore his writing roots, he learned that his grandfather's legacy was more alive in him than he could . A. Volmer said Get past the middle doldrums.. My review and ratings for this book are broken into three distinct parts:Three stars for the first two-thirds, because it was intermittently interesting and engrossing, but sometimes confusing to try to keep track of whose grandfather/father he was talking about.By the time I got to the last hundred pages or so, I had dropped it to a one star with these comments:It appears to be no easy task to live up to the hype of a mythical literary family member, harder still for
Shroder introduces us to many fascinating characters—from Kantor himself, to Ernest Hemingway, to Shroder’s larcenous great-grandfather. He was hardest of all on his family, and his lack of grace left him to die alone; Shroder’s tale should give pause to everybody who thinks he’s better than he is—that is, everybody.” —Stephen Hunter, New York Times–bestselling author of the Bob Lee Swagger series“Tom Shroder has accomplished something extraordinary with The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived. With equal measures of sympathy and dispassion, he has investigated the life of his grandfather and used it as a