People I Have Loved, Known or Admired

by Leo Rosten

Book Overview

People I Have Loved, Known or Admired, 1970 1st Editiion, by Leo Rosten. Hardcover with dust jacket, 410 pages, published by McGraw-Hill. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671785958
• ISBN13: 9780671785956
• Release Date: March 1973
• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Length: 370 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An out of print gem

This book was recommended to me by a blog whose name I have since forgotten. It is out of print, and can be bought for literally pennies. What a gem. I recall Leo Rosten for his H*Y*M*A*N K*AP*L*A*N books and his Joy of Yiddish as being a light, humorous writer. Well this book displays he was a much deeper thinker, and had political and philosophical bents which would not be out of place today. The cover art is dated, but unlike a lot of other relics from the seventies, this book has real application today. Inspirational chapters about giants on earth including Winston Churchill, the artist Klee, Sigmund Freud, Groucho Marx, are mixed in with delightful Rosten comedic observations about his father, and friends from childhood. And not so heavy on the Yiddish that goyim such as myself could't enjoy it. (Did that sentence sound a little Yiddish? maybe its infectious.) Anyway, a lost and recovered gem. Whatever blogger recommended this, I'll never find you to thank you, but this book is a delightful and very undated source of reading pleasure.

Worth the Schlep

Move over, Mark Twain. Make eppes room for another contributor to an American vernacular. Leo Rosten, author of The Joys of Yiddish, H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, and other memorable works, compiled a collection of pieces under the title People I Have Known, Loved or Admired. When I first saw the title, I thought, "Feh! Such a schmaltzy title. Probably an ongapatshket thing by some possibility-thinking optimist or Reader's Digest. And then my eye caught the author's name. Such a collection of characters! Some famous (DaVinci, Freud) others close to hearth and home (his father), and a momzer, a nebbech, and even an exasperatingly rational Milton Friedman. Like Mark Twain, Leo Rosten he has a piquant way of phrasing thoughts in the familiar patois of the Yiddish community he grew up in. If this book, or any other book by Rosten, is unavailable here, or your local bookstore, try the public library, or college library. The interlibrary loan is an excellent source of hard-to-find books. So find it already! Enjoy!