SOURCE: "A Believer in the City," in New Republic, Vol. 215, No. 7, August 12, 1996, pp. 35-6.

[Alter is an American translator, author, and critic. In the following review, he offers a laudatory assessment of A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment.]

In over half a century of activity as a writer, Alfred Kazin has often been associated with "the New York intellectuals." In some minds, Kazin-Howe-Trilling-Rahv and company form a continuous blur. Kazin himself has intermittently acted as their chronicler in four memoiristic volumes. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment offers a very different mode of self-presentation from his sundry memoirs, and it makes clear that in some fundamental ways he is quite unlike the secular, worldly, politically minded literary critics with whom he is usually linked.

This new book of diaries, it must be said, is a slippery book in regard to genre, because the nature of the selecting and...