He worked for the NYer for years and later was in publishing. He has a wry sense of humor and I like how the book blends him talking about his family history and some tragedy and insights into himself with descriptions of work and the interesting people he worked with. He confirms that Shawn was an asshole and that William Maxwell was wonderful (I'd have cried if the latter wasn't true - So Long, See You Tomorrow is one of my favorite books.) ( )

Literate, witty, poignant, inspiring. Excellent memoir by a former New Yorker magazine fact checker-turned-fiction editor-turned-book publishing editor-in-chief. Perhaps I'm the perfect reader for this book, given my many years as a New Yorker subscriber and enthusiast. I related to the author's love of words, his obsessive fact-checking tendencies, and his hunger for truth (yes, even/especially in fiction). Among the author's career highlights: http://danielmenaker.com/about/ ( )

A very charming, honest and well-written book. Sad that his whole life is haunted by the title of the book - he feels responsible for the death of his brother. Very interesting inside look at life inside the New Yorker - the second book I've read that confirms what an insular (albeit wonderfully erudite) place it is.

With many memoirs, you end up being sick of the person, or at least realizing how narcissistic memoir writing is. Quite the opposite here - I really liked Menaker. ( )

[Editor-in-chief William] Shawn always claims that The New Yorker does not and cannot, with integrity, try to attend to what a reader might want to read. We publish what we like, and hope that some people might want to read it too. [When a Table of Contents is finally added, the staff gasps:] “It’s none of the readers’ business what’s in the magazine.”

Daniel Menaker’s memoir begins in childhood with an intense sibling rivalry and a tragedy, and concludes in his seventies. There are some touching passages, particularly in childhood, but it’s the middle that’s most of the book and the most interesting -- inside stories from his decades of work at The New Yorker as a fact checker, then copy editor and Fiction Editor, largely under Shawn (who told Menaker to find another place to work and he finally did, 26 years later).

There are also bits about Tina Brown and a mention of Robert Gottlieb, and some about his early career teaching English at a top private school, his own writing, and his late career in book publishing at Random House and Harper Collins. There’s a fine passage about the value of a humanities education that’s too long to quote here; but if you can “search inside” or google part or all of his conclusion (“If you are lucky enough to be educated well in an ivory tower, it will help to prepare you to descend from that tower and deal with un-ivoried reality”), you'll get to the paragraph.

I think that some of us have more than one mother and many if not most of us, especially boys, have more than one father.

A continuing thread in the memoir is fathers -- his emotionally (and often physically) absent father, and the surrogate fathers he accumulates, one of whom is William Maxwell, a man I grew to like so much that I had to read the 1982 Paris Review interview with him. I also found Menaker quite likeable -- light, funny, quiet. He wrote what he liked and I enjoyed reading it.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) ( )