SOURCE: "The Searchers," in New York Times Book Review, October 12, 1997.

[In the following review, Herman lauds God and the American Writer.]

Alfred Kazin has got to be the most impassioned reader of literature in all of American life right now—a reader so filled with emotion that, like an ardent lover, he seems nearly to tremble at the sight of his beloved, which is a good book. The intensity comes, I think, partly from the immigrant struggles of his Brooklyn upbringing long ago, so that even now, in his 80's, he gazes outward on America's classic literature as on the sunny shore of his own salvation—from parochialism, poverty, European persecution, narrow-mindedness, ignorance and the pain of being unable to (as Emerson used to say) vent. But mostly his passion derives from impulses that can only be called religious. He turns to books as if in search of...