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Praise for John Leonard:
Wickedly clever and deliciously entertaining.
[John Leonard] lights the night sky of my ignorance with sizzles and bangs, and gorgeous blooms of fire.
Funny and smart as hell.
For any partisan of intellectual journalism, Leonard is a small treasure.
Leonard wields a laugh-out-loud magic with words.
Leonard brings together the arcane and the everyday to achieve a clarity that is dazzling. I was knocked out by his insights.
Lonesome Rangers
Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures
hardcover
$27.95
John Leonard, “the fastest wit in the East” (The New York Times Book Review), is back with the off-beat, wide-ranging style that earned his last book, When the Kissing Had to Stop, a place among the Voice Literary Supplement’s “25 Favorites of 1999.” Now, with an eye to the social and political experience of writers, Leonard adopts a broad definition of exile.
He addresses Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, where exile manifests itself in solitary bowling, a reflection of a declining sense of community. He considers Salman Rushdie as rock’n’roll Orpheus, who—after ten years in fatwa-enforced exile—bears a striking resemblance to his continually disappearing characters. And Leonard also explores Primo Levi’s exile of survival, Bruce Chatwin’s self-imposed exile in travel, as well as the work of Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Phillip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, and Don DeLillo, among others.
As always, Leonard’s writing jumps off the page, engaging the reader in what the Washington Post calls his “laugh-out-loud magic with words.”
John Leonard is the former editor of the New York Times Book Review and literary coeditor of The Nation. He now appears weekly on CBS Sunday Morning.
Fall 2001
hardcover
5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 352 pages
978-1-56584-694-4
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