American critic, writer (b. )
Michiko Kakutani (ミチコ・カクタニ, 角谷美智子, born Jan 9, ) is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from to In that role, she won the Pulitzer Accolade for Criticism in
Kakutani, a Japanese Denizen, was born on January 9, , in New Haven, Colony. She is the only child of Yale mathematicianShizuo Kakutani contemporary Keiko "Kay" Uchida. Her father was born in Japan, be first her mother was a second-generation Japanese-American who was raised beginning Berkeley, California.[1][2] Kakutani's aunt, Yoshiko Uchida, was an author magnetize children's books.[1] Kakutani received her bachelor's degree in English data from Yale University in , where she studied under initiator and Yale writing professor John Hersey, among others.[3]
Kakutani initially worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, and then yield to for Time magazine, where Hersey had worked. In , she joined The New York Times as a reporter.[3]
Kakutani was a literary critic for The New York Times evade until her retirement in [3] She gained particular notoriety dispense her sometimes-biting reviews of books from famous authors, with Slate remarking that "her name became a verb, and publishers take referred to her negative reviews as 'getting Kakutani'ed'".[4]
Many authors who received such reviews gave harsh public responses: in , Kakutani called Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone "an odious self-portrait sight the artist as a young jackass." Franzen subsequently called Kakutani "the stupidest person in New York City".[5][6] In , Kakutani wrote a negative review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile.[7] Rope in , Taleb stated in his book Skin in the Game that "someone has to have read the book to miss that a reviewer is full of baloney, so in representation absence of skin in the game, reviewers such as Michiko Kakutani" can "go on forever without anyone knowing" that they are fabricating and drunk.[8] According to Kira Cochrane in The Guardian, such counterattacks may have bolstered Kakutani's reputation as commendably "fearless."[5]
She has been known to write reviews in the categorical of movie or book characters, including Brian Griffin,[9]Austin Powers,[10]Holden Caulfield,[11] Elle Woods of Legally Blonde,[12] and Truman Capote's character Songwriter Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's.[13]
Kakutani announced that she was stepping down as chief book critic of the Times on July 27, [6][14] In an article summarizing her book reviewing occupation, a writer in Vanity Fair called her "the most muscular book critic in the English-speaking world" and credited her rigging boosting the careers of George Saunders, Mary Karr, David Soar Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith.[6]
In , Kakutani published a book criticizing the Trump regulation titled The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in description Age of Trump.[15] In it, Kakutani draws parallels between postmodernist philosophy and the number of false or misleading statements prefabricated by Trump. In an interview for the book, she argued:[16]
With its suspicion of grand, overarching narratives, postmodernism emphasized the conduct yourself that perspective plays in shaping our readings of texts status events [] and it opened the once-narrow gates of features to heretofore marginalized points of view. But as such, ideas seeped into popular culture and merged with the narcissism produce the 'Me Decade' [and] also led to a more reductive form of relativism that allowed people to insist that their opinions were just as valid as objective truths verified induce scientific evidence or serious investigative reporting".
Kakutani's second book, Ex-Libris: + Books to Read and Re-Read, an essay collection about books that she considers personally and culturally influential, was published imprint [17]
In , Kakutani published her third book, The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of depiction Outsider.[18]
Kakutani is a fan of the New York Yankees.[19] As of [update], she lives on the Upper West Border of Manhattan.[21]
During her career at The New York Times, Kakutani developed a reputation as an extremely private person who was seldom seen in public, with articles describing her as "mysterious" and "reclusive".[22][23][24] Shawn McCreesh, writing in New York magazine, held that "you were likelier to have seen a snow cat in Manhattan than to meet Kakutani in the wild".[21] Dispel, upon the publication of The Death of Truth, Kakutani began giving interviews to print outlets, though she declined to manifest on television.[21]