Thursday, February 7, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
Review: Kazin’s diaries enliven Cook biography
By Martin Rubin
Alfred Kazin A Biography By Richard M. Cook YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS; 452 PAGES; $35
. . . Kazin’s account in “A Walker in the City” of his upbringing and his parents’ poverty and struggles in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn is a classic of American immigrant literature, and his biographer rightly begins his own book by quoting the sentence “Brownsville is that road which every other road in my life has had to cross.” But he has already provided an even more evocative quote from Kazin’s journals in the epigraph: “Looking back upon it [the hot summer of his childhood] is like opening my mind to everything out of that childhood I’ve wanted so desperately to lose and can never lose.” . . .
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