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Me and Shakespeare: My Late Life Adventure with the Bard [Secure Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe Reader 7]
eBook by Herman Gollob
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eBook Category: People
eBook Description:  One man's post-retirement passion for the works of history's greatest literary genius becomes an inspiring intellectual and spiritual adventure--and a lesson in the ageless wisdom to be found in literature. In the twilight of a successful career as a book editor, Herman Gollob attended a superb Broadway production of Hamlet with Ralph Fiennes. The experience proved so galvanizing that it ignited a latent passion for literary scholarship and for all things Shakespearean. Shedding the drudgery of fixing halt and lame manuscripts, he engaged in a fever of self-education via a vast array of books, videotapes, performances, and lectures--becoming, as he put it, "an old man made mad by love of Shakespeare." In short order, he became so well versed that he began teaching a popular Shakespeare course for seniors at a small local college in New Jersey. He then made a visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. sought out encounters with great actors and directors--including Olympia Dukakis, Michael Kahn, David Suchet, John Barton, and Cicely Berry; took a summer course on Shakespeare at Oxford; and made a pilgrimage to the Globe Theatre in London to see, of course, Hamlet. This late-blooming Bardomania even enriched the growth of his Jewish identity, resulting in a uniquely Hebraic theory about King Lear. In relating this tale of an autodidact's progress, Gollob interweaves his rich family history, personal experience, and past meetings with the great and notorious, including Orson Welles, James Jones, Lee Marvin, Frank Sinatra, Donald Barthelme, James Clavell, Dan Jenkins, Willie Morris, and a host of others. Like Great Books by David Denby, Me and Shakespeare is a memoir that attests to the lifelong power of literature to enrich, enlarge, and exalt. It is, as well, one of the most entertaining and unusual books on Shakespeare ever written.
eBook Publisher: Random House, Inc., Published: 2003
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2003
Available eBook Formats [Secure Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe Reader 7 - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT (828 KB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT (543 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE ADOBE READER 7 FORMAT (1.3 MB]
Secure Adobe Reader 7: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Adobe Acrobat Reader ISBN, eReader (recommended) ISBN: 1400076307
Microsoft Reader ISBN: 9781400076
MobiPocket Reader ISBN: 9780385498180
 
"[A] lively hybrid of memoir, Bildungsroman and literary criticism [with] the conversational ease, raconteur's charm and digressive storytelling of a one-man show."--The New York Times Book Review "A unique and sympathetic record of an extraordinary kinship."--Houston Chronicle
"A delightful read ... what makes his volume most engaging is the skill with which he describes the people and places he gets to know in his quest to find out as much as he can about what keeps Shakespeare vibrant in a world so different from the one in which the playwright's art came to fruition."--The Washington Post "No one has ever brought the world of the planet Shakespeare so vividly alive as Gollob has in his book, no one.... Gollob's search for Shakespeare led him to a search for himself and his roots that I found very moving. He could do that I think because Shakespeare deepened and shaped him and opened him into a new and joyous life. I salute him for sharing that life and writing this splendid book."--Pat Conroy "A true pleasure: bookish without being academic, smart without being smart-alecky, always with an eye on the original work and not on its interpreter's cleverness.... Good fun--and an inspiration for readers to return to Shakespeare on their own."--Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Thoroughly engaging.... [Gollob's] enthusiasm for his subject is contagious ... and his boyish zeal comes across as a call to arms to all readers who've ever contemplated changing their lives."--Publishers Weekly "Anecdote-laden, rich with gossip, and brimming with all things Shakespearean."--BookPage "How refreshing to have a study of Shakespeare that avoids the flatulent portentousness of the 'higher' criticism and that sets off immediately in an authentic human voice.... Among his many felicities, we should all applaud Gollob's saving Shakespeare for the Jews, or rather for the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which Shakespeare ... is as securely planted as an everlasting oak."--Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization "Gollob comes to Shakespeare with the zeal of a convert and the knowledge of a neophyte.... satisfying and delightfully idiosyncratic."--Buffalo News "A triumph of communication.... Bubbling with life and vitality, bristling with wit and wisdom, [Gollob's] reader-friendly memoir is an impassioned celebration."--The Tennesseean (Nashville)
Somewhat past the middle of the journey, my life had taken an unexpected turn. On a golden day in October 1997, I found myself driving to Caldwell College, a small Catholic school in New Jersey operated by Dominican nuns, where I would be teaching an eight-week, two-hours-per-week course on Shakespeare to adults over fifty.
This would be my first experience as a teacher. I was not a Shakespeare scholar. At the age of sixty-seven, I was embarking on what might turn out to be a new career, a reinvention of myself. The thrills and chills accompanying a journey into the unpredictable were escalating into the queasiness and near-panic of that primal terror, stage fright. I felt I had to bedazzle the audience that awaited me; I needed to prove myself as someone capable of bringing the work of Shakespeare dramatically alive for mature students, filling his plays with an immediacy that would make them resonate in the hearts and minds of the class as it had in mine during a recent period of obsessive self-instruction. Moreover, I wanted these people to adore me. I'd been rehearsing the introductory lecture for two weeks, day and night, to the point where I knew much of it from memory, and I began reciting it aloud as I drove west on Bloomfield Avenue, through the town of Verona, no less, toward another beginning: "I'm Herman Gollob, and I'll be your guide for the next two months on a magical mystery tour of what Ralph Waldo Emerson described as the Planet Shakespeare." The noted and notably idiosyncratic twentieth-century man of letters Ford Madox Ford once referred to himself as an old man made mad by a love of writing. I'd become an old man made mad by a love of Shakespeare. How had it happened? Early in the spring of 1995, I decided to retire in July, when I turned sixty-five. For more than thirty-five years I'd been editing books for a variety of publishers in various capacities, some of them managerial, and I'd ultimately maneuvered myself into the executive hierarchy as a senior vice-president. A certain weariness had begun to overtake me. In fact, I'd begun to resemble my briefcase: outside, battered and worn; inside, musty and cluttered. In a short story by the singularly gifted and, alas, recently deceased American writer Andre Dubus, an editor is haunted by the idea that he carries around an author's dreams in his briefcase. But in reality he also carries, all too often, evidence of an author's unfulfilled promise, unrealized expectations, and irremediable incompetence. T. S. Eliot, in one of his Four Quartets, "East Coker," described writing as "a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating," and I discovered that in my case Eliot could just as well have been describing the editorial process. For some time the fun had gone out of publishing. My competitive fires were banked; the hunger to acquire new books, the thrill at discovering new authors and championing them inside the company and in the Darwinian world of commerce, had subsided. Worse, I'd begun to greet submissions from agents not with a sense of expectancy but with resentment: why was I being asked to consider yet another lame and halt manuscript that would have been better served had it been placed into the hands of a faith healer? My career was no longer an adventure in the exciting and political New York literary scene, crackling with suspense, but a recurring cycle of the predictable and familiar. Again, T. S. Eliot seemed to be speaking to me, in yet another of his quartets, "Little Gidding": Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort. First, the cold...
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