Scraps, Orts, and Fragments: Pieces of a Life

(Hardback)

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Scraps, Orts, and Fragments: Pieces of a Lifeis a collection of essays, written in fits over several years, comprising what the title suggests: snapshots of a life without any attempt to fashion them into a coherent narrative. Michael Rosenthal explores subjects as diverse as his teen-age fascination with Hubert's Flea Circus on New York's 42nd Street; life with his stoic father; sex in the fifties (for "Nice Horace Mann boys"); a brief and unspectacular performance as a janitor while a graduate student in Wisconsin; step-fathering; assorted aspects of a long career as a college Dean; and Rosenthal's tenure as a member of the Board of Directors of a wildly successful company on the New York Stock Exchange. And other memorable moments . . . some treated head-on, some with a gentle irony they deserve. In Scraps, Orts, and Fragments, Rosenthal has provided opportunities for people to experience a life through his eyes, and as he states, experiences which are "interesting for me to have lived it all, perhaps amusing and interesting for readers."

Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

BARNEY

"Setting up shop on the corner where the mid-century avant-garde met Victorian pornography, Barney Rosset helped crack wide open the staid world of American publishing. Michael Rosenthal's smart and candid biography captures the insatiable spirit of an oft unlovely but always intrepid literary daredevil."--Sean Wilentz

"Illuminating, insightful, and informative--a piquant portrait of a renegade publisher."--Kirkus Reviews

"From the opening sentence of this marvelous, fleet, perfectly rendered portrait of Barney Rosset--the most important American book publisher of the twentieth century . . . to its last--Michael Rosenthal has created an elegant, clear-eyed, irresistibly readable account of the renegade publisher who tore himself and the reading public through the rusting gates of American Puritanism and censorship. In this book Rosenthal has done his subject and his readers superb service."--Ric Burns

THE CHARACTER FACTORY

". . . a fascinating study, not merely of the Boy Scout movement but of a violent and bewildered age. Among other things it is a key to the imperial mind."--Paul Theroux

NICHOLAS MIRACULOUS

"The reissue of Michael Rosenthal's NICHOLAS MIRACULOUS, is cause for celebration on at least three counts. It reaffirms the book's literary excellence, attests to its value as a work of history, and shows why biography--the most maligned branch of modern literature--is a necessity in any culture aspiring to understand itself."--Patricia O'Toole

Author Bio

MICHAEL ROSENTHAL was Associate Dean of Columbia College for seventeen years. His rich career includes winning a Guggenheim Fellowship, becoming the first holder of the Roberta and William Campbell Professor of the Humanities, and earning Columbia College's Alexander Hamilton medal, its highest honor. His books include Virginia Woolf; The Character Factory--Baden Powell's Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire; Nicholas Miraculous : The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler; and Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America's Maverick Publisher and His Battle Against Censorship. Rosenthal received a B.A from Harvard and his PhD in English from Columbia. He lives on New York's Upper West Side where, with his wife, Judith, they raised their three sons.