The hordes of young people who still aspire to working in the publishing industry have dreams that look a lot like the professional life lived by Bob Gottlieb.  Over several decades working at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, Gottlieb shaped the books, careers, and occasionally the lives of many writers.  Some, such as Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, Edna O’Brien, and John Le Carré, were literary heavyweights.  Others were stars of a different kind: Katherine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and Bill Clinton, for example.

Avid Reader, Gottlieb’s autobiography, manages to avoid the gossipy character and self-satisfied tone of many memoirs of the publishing industry.  In part, that’s because he realizes how fortunate he was in his choice of career and is endearingly modest about his achievements.  His mantra, that it’s the authors and the books that matter, tends to underplay the real contribution he made to some wonderful books, a contribution most of his admiring authors were more than happy to acknowledge.

I would have liked more detail about the process of editing and Gottlieb’s approach to it.  He was (and still is) an extremely accomplished editor.  Avid Reader, entertaining and informative as it is, never quite explains the “secret sauce”.

The books I discover and buy are rarely those displayed on the table-tops of bookstores but very occasionally, among the overstocked dross, a gem catches my eye.  That happened recently in a store in Chelsea Market when I spotted The Last Interview and Other Conversations.  What a find that proved to be.

The book collects four interviews given by James Baldwin between 1961 and 1987, the last one recorded just a few months before he died in Provence. They cover the preoccupations of his life and his work: the state of America, relationships between the races there, and the condition of being an exile.  Along the way, there are some wonderful anecdotes and vignettes, of Norman Mailer, Miles Davis, and Richard Wright among others. The distinctiveness and power of Baldwin’s voice – and the fierce independence of his mind and spirit – shout down through the years in these conversations.  “I don’t see anything in American life to aspire to.  Nothing at all.  It’s all so very false. So shallow, so plastic, so morally and ethically corrupt”.

What comes across so clearly in these transcripts is how passionate, uncompromising, and eloquent a witness he was in the world.  At the end of the interview with Studs Terkel, Baldwin said “I want to be an honest man.  And I want to be a good writer“.  He was both and how lucky we are that he was.

“It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.  The daily news fills one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise …”

Philip Roth wrote these words in 1961.  They are a reminder that the ability of American reality to disgust, to appall, and to confound didn’t begin with the election of Trump. One of the great achievements of Michiko Kakutani’s new book, The Death of Truth, is to hold up to our eyes two complementary truths: politicians lying and distorting for their own purposes is nothing new (think of Bush and his cabal justifying the war in Iraq); and the Trump administration’s mendacity is at a level so unparalleled that it represents a threat to the future of American democracy itself.

The central point of the book is simple enough.  Trump’s relentless lies add up to a planned and systematic distortion of reality and a carefully constructed narrative designed to exploit the fears and prejudices of his supporters. Deploying powerful technological tools unavailable to the ideologues of the past – right and left, fascist and communist – and aided by the trolls and bots of hostile foreign actors, Trump has tapped into segregated America’s relativism and narcissism to advance an Orwellian program designed to centralize power and wealth in the hands of a small minority.  Kakutani offers few remedies to withstand the onslaught: don’t give in to cynicism and defeatism, stand up for the institutions that have served America so well and for so long (especially a free press), and commit to the pursuit and expression of truth.  That last part looks especially tricky right now …

As you would expect from someone as well-read as Kakutani, the range of sources deployed to support her arguments is wide and varied but this is no dry academic thesis. There’s no attempt here to be cool, distant, and dispassionate.  This isn’t the calm and measured analysis of the Trump presidency that will come in time.  It’s a book hot with outrage and incredulity. That might prove to be its lasting value: a passionate but coherent indictment of terrible and dangerous times written up-close while the storm is raging around us.