Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built isn’t just a biography. In its pages, Gayle Feldman depicts a lost world, at times a lost paradise, when New York, Hollywood and the literary life were at their most glamorous and privileged. It’s quite a story, and because of the book’s length, reading it will see you through the rest of January and possibly the entire winter ... Throughout Nothing Random, Feldman’s prose is always journalistically clear and sometimes wonderfully apt ... Even her endnotes make for fascinating reading. Still, she sometimes indulges a penchant for more detail than is needed. For example, the opening chapters move slowly, and there’s an overlong description of Random House’s palazzo-like headquarters on Madison Avenue. But taste in these matters differs. Above all else, though, this is a superb work with nary a hint of hagiography ... It’s unquestionably a work of biographical reclamation but also a whole lot of fun — which is just what Cerf would have wanted.
Swing open the saloon doors: There’s a new Power Broker in town. For surely the story of the publishing behemoth Random House, told through its charismatic co-founder Bennett Cerf, is as worthy of crossing the thousand-page mark as the story of how Robert Moses bulldozed New York. Books are just as much part of the city’s infrastructure as highways and housing developments. And this one, Nothing Random, by the veteran Publishers Weekly reporter Gayle Feldman, is as delightful as it is hefty ... 'The important thing was never to be bored,' Feldman writes, perhaps unwittingly paraphrasing Eloise at the Plaza, another blockbuster franchise from which Random swiped a sugarplum.
Gloriously, even when its author is examining balance sheets or citation slips, there is no such danger in Nothing Random. If Moses envisioned a world of gray concrete overpasses, Cerf’s was a fountain-spouting Imagination Playground.
This cinematic biography of Random House founder Bennett Cerf from longtime PW writer Feldman (You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother) teems with a star-studded cast including Truman Capote, James Joyce, Alfred Knopf, Ayn Rand, and Dick Simon ... Drawing on Cerf’s personal archive, as well those of writers he worked with, and more than 200 interviews, Feldman paints a candid portrait of one of the giants of modern publishing, who emerges as a charming, humorous man who was open to 'many worlds, high and low, mass and class' and committed to his authors. This is monumental.
Engaging biography of the man who was at the center of the American publishing scene—and ubiquitous in many other venues—for half a century ... A well-crafted life of a publisher whose world spanned culture high and low, and whose influence endures.
