Albums of a Life

“In an age of narrow self interest (both kinds), with memoirs falling from the press like autumn leaves in a high wind, Stanley Kauffmann’s Albums of a Life is virtually unique. As the title suggests, his purpose in writing about himself, his ways and means over a long lifetime, has no higher or lower purpose than to collect memories that fall together around a person, place or subject. As such he is not overtly telling us his inside story or delivering his career, whether for the public record or the annals of gossip, or bending his experience to make some large political or cultural point. Instead of the typically heated prose of the private memoir or the typically flat style of the public one, his tone is crisply genial, warmly objective, the prose of a writer who does not try to dig into or inflate or argue his experience but to commemorate it in an exact, felt, uncoercive way. Like an album of carefully selected photographs that span a lifetime, they are unassuming and they matter. Open any of these discrete, ad hoc remembrances and you touch a rich life.”—from the Introduction by Ted Solotaroff