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A Memoir
In this, his first memoir, celebrated biographer and non-fiction book author Robert Kanigel tells of "muddling" his way into adulthood, love, and a new life. The 1950s formed him first; then the 1960s got their grip on him.
As Hemingway wrote, "It happened gradually, then suddenly." Robert Kanigel, a grade-skipping Jewish fellow from Brooklyn, went from engineering war weaponry in Baltimore to telling stories of geniuses, special places, and big ideas.
Kanigel broke from the predictable middle-class life ordained for him by chasing a living muse, Maura, to Paris, to Germany, and back to Baltimore. There, his confusion, his young man's muddle, played out over the next year and a half, ultimately leading him to the door of an underground newspaper.
What followed was a career of critically heralded nonfiction writing, and many books, including the recent Hearing Homer's Song, and The Man Who Knew Infinity, which became an international 2015-2016 IFC/Warner Brothers film of the same name starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.
The subjects of Kanigel's books have included the natives of Ireland's Great Blasket Island, urban activist Jane Jacobs (nemesis of New York powerbroker Robert Moses), the unruly medical masters and apprentices at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health, sensual Nice on the French Riviera, Homeric scholar Milman Parry (in Hearing Homer's Song), mathematics genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, and industrial "efficiency expert" Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Today the author—a little older, worlds wiser, the muddle never entirely resolved—looks back. And he transcends.
Excerpt (PDF opens in a new window).
You can see the full discussion in our legacy forum here. This discussion will contain spoilers!
Some of the recent comments posted about Young Man, Muddled:
At what point do you "become" something? Is it the day you start, or when you look back later and realize that's what you are? How much of what we become is due to the people around us?
You don't become something merely by starting it. You become it when you realize it's a good fit and want to continue. Especially when it come to careers. I tried many things as a young woman. They didn't all stick and when I look ... - laurag
Could you relate to his feeling of loneliness in childhood? Do you think being an introvert or extrovert is a product of nature or nurture?
Nope. I grew up with four brothers and sisters, I had 34 cousins relatively close by, and a neighborhood where every house was bursting at the seams with kids. We didn't have a chance to be an introvert (although admittedly I used to hide ... - triciat50
Did Chapter 16, as an ending to this book, feel satisfying???
I knew ahead of time that this was going to be about a short period in his life, so I wasn't surprised at the ending. I think he had an excellent editor, because going through how that time frame affected the entire rest of his life would have ... - triciat50
How well do you think Kanigel understood Maura's depression at the time? Do you think he'd have reacted differently if he'd been older?
He did not understand it well at all. Even today, clinical depression (and many other mental health conditions) isn't well understood by the general public. There is still, despite all the efforts made to combat it, a stigma attached ... - juliaa
If you lived through the Vietnam era, what is your impression, looking back at the period? If you don't personally recollect the time, what impression have you formed of it? Was the era truly different?
I was in my early-mid teens during the end of the Vietnam era. I was old enough to see the chaos, confusion, and rebellions taking place across the country. Several of my parents friends lost their sons to war or suicide after returning home. These ... - poniesnpearls
"In his sensitive debut memoir, essayist, biographer, and nonfiction writer Kanigel (b. 1946) recounts his life in the 1960s, crucial years when the Vietnam War roiled the country and he confronted his unsettled future… Thoughtful, candid reminiscences from a veteran writer." ―Kirkus Reviews
"A primer on coming of age in a fissuring society, Kanigel's beautiful, probing, deeply moving memoir is one you won't put down." —Tristine Skyler, Executive Produce of IFC Films' The Man Who Knew Infinity
"In his absorbing memoir, the acclaimed journalist Robert Kanigel finally turns his keen eye on himself, taking the reader on his journey from shy youth in the conformist 1950s to full-blooded personhood in the liberating tumult of the 1960s and leaving us just as he starts what was to be a long and brilliant writing career. Tender, reflective, witty, rueful, always honest, and always good company, Kanigel reveals himself with eloquent simplicity and rare candor. A tour de force of self-examination, Young Man, Muddled opens a window onto the origin story of an extraordinary life." ―Ellen Pall, author of Must Read Well
"Kanigel is a great biographer. He has a marvelous gift for finding interesting characters and using them to reveal the world in which they lived, and which they usually helped to shape. In this book, he trains his sights on himself. Writing with revealing honesty and marvelous grace, he uses the story of his own life to illuminate an important moment in American life." ―Charles Duff, author of The North Atlantic Cities
"An exhilarating journey into the mystery of self. Kanigel's sifting through the confusions, hopes, and longings of his past invites all of us to do the same. We'll be better for it." —Arthur J. Magida, author of Code Name Madeleine: A Sufi Spy in Nazi-Occupied Paris
"Robert Kanigel writes as engagingly about himself as he does about others. While this memoir, engagingly depicting Kanigel's early struggles to find his path, is fascinating in and of itself, it's also a highly useful vehicle for self-recall-reflection on the part of the reader."
—Robert O. Pierce, former director of the Peabody Institute, John Hopkins University
"An inviting depiction of a particular time and place, Young Man, Muddled maintains a tight focus on young Rob's first experiences living on his own, falling in and out of love, finding a path out of his initial career in ballistics engineering and into the writing life... Kanigel's memories—warmly written and fondly recollected as they are—do not shy away from points of wrongheadedness or deep shame, of honestly exploring his youthful fear of jumping into the unknown, of recognizing the myriad times, as he says at the beginning of our conversation, 'I f—ed up.' The result is a lived-in, highly relatable portrait of a young man trying to figure himself out against the vivid backdrop of Vietnam-era Baltimore." —Baltimore Fish Bowl
"Robert Kanigel is a gifted writer whose abilities have been recognized with prominent literary awards and accolades. He applies his unique perspective to a young man's coming-of-age story that will surely touch anyone who grew up during the Vietnam War era."
—Marcy Miller, author of the acclaimed memoir Rebooting in Beverly Hills
This information about Young Man, Muddled was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Michael Lionstar
Robert Kanigel is the author of nine previous books, most recently Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry and, before that, Eyes on the Street, his biography of Jane Jacobs. He has received many awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, the Grady-Stack Award for science writing, and an NEH Public Scholar grant. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; it has been translated into more than a dozen languages and was the basis for the film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Kanigel and his wife, the poet S. B. Merrow, live in Baltimore.
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