Mailer Scholarship as Equipment for Living

The Testament of Barry Leeds

Authors

  • John Whalen-Bridge National University of Singapore Author

Keywords:

book review, Barry H. Leeds, memoir, literature and life, grief

Abstract

John Whalen-Bridge reviews A Moveable Beast: Scenes from My Life, a memoir by Barry H. Leeds, who wrote the first book-length study of Mailer. The memoir is built from vignettes rather than strict chronology and rests on Leeds’s belief that reading and living cannot be separated. That belief is tested most by his daughter’s suicide. Whalen-Bridge praises Leeds’s lean, well-timed style, the range of the vignettes, and their candor, and he recommends the book warmly.

Author Biography

  • John Whalen-Bridge, National University of Singapore

    John Whalen-Bridge is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. Author of Political Fiction and the American Self (Illinois 1998), he is also editor of a special issue on Norman Mailer for Journal of Modern Literature (2006) and Norman Mailer’s Later Fiction: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest (Palgrave 2010). He has co-edited (with Gary Storhoff) the SUNY series, “Buddhism and American Culture.” This SUNY series includes Emergence of Buddhist American Literature (2009), American Buddhism as a Way of Life (2010), Writing as Enlightenment (2010), and Buddhism and American Cinema (2014). His article “Multiple Modernities and the Tibetan Diaspora” has appeared in South Asian Diaspora, “What Is a ‘Buddhist Movie’?” is forthcoming from Contemporary Buddhism, and he is writing a book for Palgrave’s “Pivot” series on Tibetan self-immolation.

Downloads

Published

2026-10-10

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): Future Bound

Section

Book Reviews