See You in Frankfurt!

In this fitfully satisfying companion to his more personal autobiography Life Before Letters, Weidhaas focuses on his professional life, 25 years of which he's spent running the Frankfurt Book Fair. Readers interested in the growth of the Fair over the past quarter century will find some interesting commentary, but as in Life Before, Weidhaas is overly concerned with identity issues and ham-strung by an inchoate sense of narrative, rendering his story in small, scattered chunks. Though there are some truly interesting episodes—such as the Fair's handling of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie—Weidhaas provides little in the way of contextualizing detail, seeming to assume that his readers are already familiar with the Fair's history and purpose (reading his A History of the Franklin Book Fair helps to clarify things). (May)