Here’s a book that sounds as though it should be a comfort to many of us:
Friday, July 11, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
Memoir review: Herbert Gold looks back
Martin Rubin
Still Alive! A Temporary Condition By Herbert Gold
Arcade; 249 pages; $25
“‘A most astonishing thing,’ wrote W.B. Yeats in 1935. ‘Seventy years have I lived.’ But in the 21st century, with people going around saying that 60 is the new 40 and 70 the new 50, and so forth, few people nowadays feel, in the words of the young Simon and Garfunkel, ‘how terribly strange to be seventy.’ Born in 1924, Herbert Gold hasn’t been 70 in a while, but judging by his unsentimental but moving memoir, he takes being old as a matter of fact, neither sugarcoating it nor wallowing in its miseries and depredations. ‘Still Alive! A Temporary Condition’ reveals a man who has had a lot to deal with in his long life but who has coped, in part by writing but mostly by just surviving – perhaps not triumphantly but with a certain measure of hard-won satisfaction. . . .
“Profoundly fond but still honest and clear-eyed, his portrait of Bellow is perhaps the truest and most insightful I have ever read. About this man he knew so well and whose writings he admired but did not worship, Gold in a couple of dozen pages comes closer to a definitive portrait of what he dubs Bellow’s ‘troubled and fortunate time on earth’ than Bellow biographers have in their hundreds of pages. . . .”
For Martin’s full review, click here or visit www.sfgate.com.