The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them
As a teenager in a Parisian expatriate's bookstore, James Atlas found Gwendolyn Brooks'sSelected Poemsand realized that "poetry could emerge out of the geography of your own experience." Jacquelyn Mitchard named a baby after the struggling heroine of Betty Smith'sA Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Ayn Rand'sAtlas Shrugged"jarred" Nelson Demille into "thinking outside the box"; Michael Stern was transported to unknown worlds by the Sears catalogue; while Sen. Joe Lieberman, an observant Jew, was molded by the Bible. In this uneven collection of often predictable musings about their favorite books by a catchall of writers (includingPW's editor, Sara Nelson), one of the few standouts is by Frank McCourt, who tastes a line from Shakespeare'sHenry VIIIwhen he's a 10-year-old typhoid patient and remembers "it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words." Unfortunately, by stuffing 71 writers into a slim volume, bookseller Coady and editor Johannessen all but ensure prosaic snippets of random thoughts rather than developed essays. The format also allows for repetition (J.D. Salinger; Harper Lee) and self-promotion (Carol Higgins Clark's inspiration was her famous mother; Anita Diamant showboats about her own novelThe Red Tentin a piece about Virginia Woolf).(Oct.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.