Avid Reader: A Life

The man who consumes and is consumed by the written word

Robert Gottlieb has had a very interesting life and career that really was several careers -- book editor, publisher, magazine editor, friend of Lincoln Kirsten as he and Balanchine were forming the NYC Ballet, then working with Edward Villella at the Miami Ballet, and always editing his writers at Knopf through all of it. It's a manic pace in what appears to have been and still is a manic life -- but manic in a good way. When Gottlieb says he is "voracious" in regard to books and that he loved his career and the work -- there isn't an instant in which I doubted the sincerity of those statements. Gottlieb is an excellent writer -- no surprise -- and he knows how to pace and tell an interesting life story. Enough detail about everything -- his parents, his colleagues, his work, the writers he edited, his wives and kids but not so much that you say "enough." He handled the story of his work life exceptionally in that he tells enough about the business of editing and publishing without making it a drag on the story, he speaks of his writers and chooses well the stories that he relates about them and their personalities and their books. He's a collector and he gives a glimpse into his travels with friends -- men or women -- who share his passions and go with him in search of whatever he and they are collecting. This is not a man who likes to be idle. He worked on weekends and was happy to do it and at no point does anything ever seem to interfere with his need "to do" and to do it well. As he stated, if he was going to work on something, he had to read everything about it so that he'd be totally prepared to deal with the subject. It's a book with a central focus -- himself. Too often in an autobiography/memoir the person doing the writing spends too much time talking about their family -- Gottlieb doesn't do that. We know his wife is an actor, we know he has a son and daughter, we don't get details about their schooling or how his travel and all-consuming career affe...