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Young Man, Muddled: A Memoir

(Paperback)

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Publishing Details

Full Title:

Young Man, Muddled: A Memoir

Contributors:

By (Author) Robert Kanigel

ISBN:

9781610885645

Publisher:

Bancroft Press

Imprint:

Bancroft Press

Publication Date:

8th May 2024

Country:

United States

Classifications

Readership:

General

Fiction/Non-fiction:

Non Fiction

Main Subject:

Physical Properties

Physical Format:

Paperback

Number of Pages:

248

Description

In this, his first memoir, celebrated biographer and non-fiction book author Robert Kanigel tells of "muddling" his way into adulthood, love, and a new life. The 1950s formed him first; then the 1960s got their grip on him. His journey, rich in its sense of time and place, begins with his childhood in Brooklyn. After college, where he was trained as an engineer, he takes a job in Baltimore with a company he calls "the ammo lab"; the Vietnam War lurks just offstage all through this story. Though his work serves the military, Kanigel shows up for the March on the Pentagon, one of the first big anti-war rallies. Later, he meets Maura, a firebrand of a woman pursuing a doctorate in biology, who beckons him to Europe. He spends lonely months in Paris, unable to crack French. With Maura. he returns to Baltimore, forsakes engineering forever, and morphs into a writer - "not," he says, "because I decided to become a writer, but because I began to write." His first project is a series of essays he proposes on a whim to an underground newspaper; this one stark act sets him on a meandering, serendipitous path that no one, least of all himself, could have predicted.

Reviews

"In his sensitive debut memoir, essayist, biographer, and nonfiction writer Kanigel (b. 1946) recounts his life in the 1960s, crucial years when the Vietnam War roiled the country and he confronted his unsettled future... Thoughtful, candid reminiscences from a veteran writer."
KIRKUS REVIEWS

"In his absorbing memoir, the acclaimed journalist Robert Kanigel finally turns his keen eye on himself, taking the reader on his journey from shy youth in the conformist 1950s to full-blooded personhood in the liberating tumult of the 1960s and leaving us just as he starts what was to be a long and brilliant writing career. Tender, reflective, witty, rueful, always honest, and always good company, Kanigel reveals himself with eloquent simplicity and rare candor. A tour de force of self-examination, Young Man, Muddled opens a window onto the origin story of an extraordinary life."
--ELLEN PALL, AUTHOR, MUST READ WELL

"Kanigel is a great biographer. He has a marvelous gift for finding interesting characters and using them to reveal the world in which they lived, and which they usually helped to shape. In this book, he trains his sights on himself. Writing with revealing honesty and marvelous grace, he uses the story of his own life to illuminate an important moment in American life."
--CHARLES DUFF, AUTHOR, THE NORTH ATLANTIC CITIES

Author Bio

ROBERT KANIGEL is the author of nine previous books, most recently Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry and, before that, Eyes on the Street, his biography of Jane Jacobs. He has received many awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, the Grady-Stack Award for science writing, and an NEH Public Scholar grant. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; it has been translated into more than a dozen languages and was the basis for the film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Kanigel and his wife, the poet S. B. Merrow, live in Baltimore.

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