John Leonard Read & Saw Everything

In beginning to compose a review of “Reading for My Life,” the latest and possibly final collection of John Leonard’s essays and criticism, one must confront the obvious absurdity of writing a book review of a collection of book reviews. Though Leonard early in the title essay admits his guilt to the popular prejudice that every critic is a stillborn novelist (he wrote his own novels until the siren song of familial responsibility became too strong to resist), his critical appraisals are no mere secondary effusions of a failed artist. Their redemption from the ephemerality of the genre is to be found in his burrowing into the heart and meat and marrow of the book at hand and in Leonard’s ostentatious advocacy for the writers he loved.