Avid Reader manages to cover all this territory, as well as Mr. Gottlieb’s decades-long association with New York City Ballet, with grace and guile and a sometimes-barbed wit ... And at times this book has, perhaps justifiably, a self-congratulatory ring. But this is an indispensable work of American publishing history, thick with instruction and soul and gossip of the higher sort.
...a delightful concoction of well-told vignettes ... Avid Reader errs on the side of congeniality. Gottlieb, for all of his blunt prose, is a smoother-over, chiefly concerned with what needs to be done but careful to manage the feelings and egos of his authors and the agents who represent them ... I took heart, as someone steeped in genre, at Gottlieb’s lack of snobbery about popular fiction ... Gottlieb never forgets it is the reader who matters, since he himself is foremost one of those people.
...[a] spledid memoir ... In these pages the account of one blockbuster follows another in a colorful procession of bestsellers...The brilliant failures, the idiosyncratic minor classics, the good, solid novels by dependable mid-list authors — these are essential to a healthy literary culture, and it would have been good to hear about some of them ... Despite my few cavils, Avid Reader will be avidly read by anyone interested in the publishing world of the past 60 years.
...as fascinating as his publishing anecdotes are, the book's warmest moments invariably attach to his accounts of [his] friendships ... Even so, his book-world anecdotes are uniformly riveting, catnip to the die-hard bookworms who will surely make up the bulk of the readership of Avid Reader.
Robert Gottlieb’s buoyant memoir of his indefatigable editorial career proves Noël Coward’s observation that work is more fun than fun ... Gottlieb confesses to the writers he was sorry to lose and the occasional good riddance, but he throws so many bouquets that the perfume can sometimes give the reader a bit of a headache ... Some of this memoir’s keenest pleasures come from a series of portraits that demonstrate how the author’s most profound associations and friendships have been with women.
...a candid account of a life devoted to reading and ultimately saved by work ... His most memorable anecdotes shed light on the relationship between an author’s temperament, ability and motivation.
Though Gottlieb does settle some late-inning scores -- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker's famed movie critic, comes off as particularly repellent -- Avid Reader is not a lip-smacking tell-all; the word juicy wouldn't fit many of its anecdotes. Gottlieb may know where all the bodies are buried, but he's not passing out maps. Still, a certain kind of (avid) reader will enjoy this long look back from one of the last giants of a profession that was utterly transformed during his years of dominance.
Among Gottlieb’s other big successes at Knopf were celebrity memoirs by Lauren Bacall (who wrote her book holed up in a Knopf office), Katharine Graham, and Bill Clinton. He recounts his work with them with zest and telling detail ... His editorial philosophy comes across most clearly in his comments about editing “genre” books—the spy thrillers of John le Carré and Len Deighton, the sci-fi best sellers of Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton—a field in which he has excelled ... Only on rare occasions, as in his account of the difficulties he encountered during the early years of raising a child with Asperger’s syndrome, does he allow himself, briefly, the kind of self-exposure many readers have come to expect from many memoirs; despite his disclaimers, his is a celebrity memoir, though a somewhat veiled one.
