My Electronic Life

Robert Caro has spent thirty-eight years writing the biography of one man.

Three things mark At the Edge of the Abyss as an utterly distinctive and unique work of Holocaust literature that must be read now that an English-language translation exists. First, the insider account of a camp; second, Koker’s literary and analytic abilities; and third, the only first-person report of an encounter between a Jew and Heinrich Himmler, head Nazi and overseer of all the camps. On Feb. 4, 1944, Koker records that on the previous day he had looked directly at the man responsible for the Final Solution. The haunting entry reads as follows:

A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don’t stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. They look everywhere without finding anything to focus on.

What Lehrer achieves in the book overall is a roaming yet cohesive description of the creative process, applied across disciplines. Creativity, as he writes, is “a catch-all term for a variety of distinct thought processes”. With as much inventiveness as he reveals in his subjects, he turns up examples of risk-taking, innovation, connectivity, recombination, disinhibition, migration, urban and cultural density and distractibility competing with concentration.

This is a tool for finding free Kindle e-books. You can sort and search in various ways. This is a good way to expand your free library beyond the out of copyright classics to contemporary free books. You can find books by established writers, presumably provided as promotions by publishers interested in generating new fans.

The world changed on 9/11, or so the cliche goes. How have writers responded to the challenge of representing this new reality?