Michiko kakutani biography books
Books by Michiko Kakutani and Complete Book Reviews
Poet at the Piano
Michiko Katutani, Author, Michiko Kakutani, Author Crown Publishers $18.95 (247p) ISBN 978-0-8129-1277-7
New York Times book critic Kakutani here gathers 35 interviews, mostly published between 1979 and 1987, of people whose work has become part of the cultural vernacular. Included are David Byrne, Laurence Olivier, Joan Didion, Stephen Sondheim, John...
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The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
Michiko Kakutani. Duggan, $22 (224p) ISBN 978-0-525-57482-8
Honest, factual debate is expiring at the hands of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, according to this overwrought jeremiad. Kakutani, the Pulitzer-winning former New York Times book critic, presents a dire view of discourse in a world of fakery and...
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Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread
Michiko Kakutani. Clarkson Potter, $25 (304p) ISBN 978-0-525-57497-2
Former New York Times book critic Kakutani delivers an ebullient celebration of books and reading. She comes up with an eclectic list of titles that have shaped her life, including classics (Shakespeare, Frankenstein, Moby-Dick), biography and...
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Michiko Kakutani
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Michiko Kakutani
American critic, writer (b. 1955)
Michiko Kakutani (ミチコ・カクタニ, 角谷美智子, born January 9, 1955) is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Early life and family
Kakutani, a Japanese American, was born on January 9, 1955, in New Haven, Connecticut. She is the only child of Yale mathematicianShizuo Kakutani and Keiko "Kay" Uchida. Her father was born in Japan, and her mother was a second-generation Japanese-American who was raised in Berkeley, California. Kakutani's aunt, Yoshiko Uchida, was an author of children's books. Kakutani received her bachelor's degree in English literature from Yale University in 1976, where she studied under author and Yale writing professor John Hersey, among others.
Career
Kakutani initially worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, and then from 1977 to 1979 for Time magazine, where Hersey had worked. In 1979, she joined The New York Times as a reporter.
Literary critic
Kakutani was a literary critic for The New York Times from 1983 until her retirement in 2017. She gained particular notoriety for her sometimes-biting reviews of books from famous authors, with Slate remarking that "her name became a verb, and publishers have referred to her negative reviews as 'getting Kakutani'ed'".
Many authors who received such reviews gave harsh public responses: in 2006, Kakutani called Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass." Franzen subsequently called Kakutani "the stupidest person in New York City". In 2012, Kakutani wrote a negative review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile. In 2018, Taleb stated in his book Skin in the Game that "someone has to have read th .