A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin

ix, 341 pp. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Kazin became the last 20th century American literary and social critic in a great tradition that began with Edmund Wilson. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment is a collection of writings from Kazin's diaries, which he has kept from the 1930s to the present. From a sensitive observer who is never at a loss for the most striking words, this is an astute and resonant portrait of cultural life in the last half century.