‘Reading for our lives’

John Leonard, a trenchant, learned, and generous critic of books and television and a clear-eyed observer of the culture at large, has died at 69 from complications of lung cancer. If you’ve never read his work, you owe it to yourself to grapple with his dazzling sentences—verbal pyrotechnics always in service of a point rather than just egotistical showoffery.

“The books we love, love us back,” he said as he accepted the National Book Critics Circle’s 2006 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. “In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them—not to pretend we’re better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agitprop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff infotainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.”

New York magazine has links to a rich selection of the columns he wrote for that publication, and there are appeciations at WashingtonPost.com, The New York Observer, Salon, HuffPo, and, of course, The New York Times, where he served in the early ’70s as editor of the Book Review.

[Photo: CBS News]