Word: sokolovic
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...RECENT food critic himself for The New York Times, it is exactly fitting that Ray Sokolov '63 should become the chronicler of the life of the journalist's gastronome and the gastronome's journalist, A.J. Leibling. Although not nearly so imposing a figure in person as the legendary New Yorker columnist (Sokolov sports 170 lbs. tops to Liebling's lifetime high of 256 lbs.), Sokolov's meticulous research techniques--the residue of a Harvard education?--and his flowing prose more than rise to the occasion of Wayward Reporter, a biography of Liebling...
...Sokolov's bond to Liebling's career runs deeper than a superficial homage to a fellow eater, though. The older writer, by the end of his life, had managed to include almost every kind of writing, journalistic and non-journalistic, in his list of accomplishments. He reviewed restaurants; covered boxing matches, great and small; witnessed D-Day and the liberation of Paris as a war correspondent; cranked out short story collections and novellas; and critiqued the state of American journalism in his "Wayward Press" column for years. One of the most prolific and versatile writers of the century, Liebling died...
...Sokolov, at the age of 37, has sampled more of the different varieties of writing that readers of his New York Times food criticism might realize. Sokolov's 1975 novel, Native Intelligence, told the story of a Harvard genius whose exploits in Africa in the Peace Corps seem to leave his abiding Ivy League smugness and a self-satisfaction unscathed; he followed it with a cookbook. As the often jocular tone of Native Intelligence indicates, he has less of a taste for dictating the ingredients of a successful life than a successful souffle...
...Wayward Reporter, Sokolov digs under Liebling's unrelenting refusal in nearly all of his work to take himself or his profession more seriously than they merited. Never burdened by the prevailing, self-deceptive myth of the objectivity of news reporting, Liebling made his the craft of shaping minute detail with careful description in his pieces until the appearances of his subjects, often the "lowlife" street hustlers and small-time entrepreneurs of New York City, gave way to their unmistakeable reality: the reality Joe Liebling saw in them. Possessed of a memory so remarkable he rarely made notes, but quoted extensively...
...SOKOLOV ATTRIBUTES to Liebling the pioneering work in the foggy area between fiction and journalism which Truman Capote and Norman Mailer later explored. Liebling's greatness lay in his absorption of the entire story--in both senses--behind people and events, from Seventh-Avenue con men to Sugar Ray Robinson. He embraced his subjects' lives and their outlook on the world; searched out their motivations and methods and then laid forth their lives, mostly in their own words--but through his own wild periscope of the self-style uptown revel, the reluctant Jew, the recipient of all that his immigrant...