For more than 30 years, Michiko Kakutani reviewed books for The New York Times, earning not just the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism but the gratitude of the novelists she exuberantly praised and the enmity of some, such as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, whose less impressive late work she filleted as expertly as a fishmonger. She shunned the literary-party circuit (for years her phone number was listed under a fictitious name in the white pages), but for those lucky enough to know her, she is generous, thoughtful, and extremely funny.
In her latest book, The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider, Kakutani explores how we arrived at such a surreal moment in our history, where truth and fantasy are embroiled in a death match and technology offers as much peril as promise. The Great Wave connects the dots in ways that are smart, penetrating, and surprising.
