The story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century afforded him a front-row seat to literary and cultural history in the making.
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.
