The Wall Street Journal doesn’t review books by its writers and regular contributors, but it does feature them in its book-review column from time to time, and I awoke this morning to find that I’d gotten the deluxe treatment, a very nice little package of excerpts from A Terry Teachout Reader called “The Critic and His Culture” in which I talk about Leonard Bernstein, Martha Graham, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, and Frank Sinatra.
The unsigned compiler of these excerpts remarks that some of the essays in the Teachout Reader
are devoted to cultural politics, others to the arts, which ideally seek to describe life, as he puts it in one essay, “in all its proliferating, ideology-transcending complexity.” Mr. Teachout writes about music, dance, literature and the movies for many publications–and, along the way, about the often wayward personalities who have dominated the American cultural scene.
I’d say that’s a pretty good summing-up of my self-drafted job description.
To read the whole piece, go here.
UPDATE: So far today, the amazon.com sales rank of the Teachout Reader has risen from somewhere around 18,000 to 477. (It was hovering around 31,000 last week.) I know, I know, that probably means seventeen people ordered copies this afternoon, but at least it makes me feel like a literary rockstar.