Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Recent Perusings - Edward Sorel's Literary Lives

Found this on the new book shelf of library. Series of anecdotes about writer's lives. Mostly their dirty laundry. In addition to Tolstoy, Sorel also skewers Sartre, Rand, Mailer, Brecht and more. This quote is apt from a book review... The scathing effect of this quick read is best described in an introduction from E.L. Doctorow: 'never have authors of such magnitude been so casually eviscerated.' I also enjoyed Sorel's First Encounters series about famous folks meeting up which like some of these literary lives appeared in The Atlantic. An old exhibit of his portraits are located at the National Portrait Gallery site. Couple of panels from the book are below but I could not find any of the more personally damaging panels. There is a nice one of Jung in a review here but Brecht seems to take the cake for being quite the scoundrel.

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