Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin

These selections from the diaries of noted author (A Walker in the City) and critic Kazin were written from 1938 to 1995; they provide his thoughts on literary and political events that occurred over four decades. Kazin grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and much of his thought-provoking commentary deals with the impact on his life of the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. Although German Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt was his friend, he disagreed bitterly with her tone of detachment in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Kazin also evokes the beauty of his first marriage (he married four times) and movingly describes what love has meant to him. He has traveled widely and shares here the experience of visiting Europe and Israel. Throughout the entries, the author expresses pleasure at reading other writers such as Saul Bellow, Simone Weil and Joseph Conrad, and offers occasional criticism. An engrossing memoir. (May)