Me and Shakespeare
My Late Life Adventure with the Bard
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
On the eve of retiring from a successful publishing career, Herman Gollob attends a wonderful Broadway production of Hamlet starring Ralph Fiennes. Galvanized by the splendor of the language, the drama and the acting, he discovers an insatiable passion for all things Shakespeare. He reads broadly and deeply about the plays, discusses them with some of the great actors, directors, and teachers of our time, and soon finds himself teaching a popular Shakespeare class at a small New Jersey college.
Gollob’s quest leads him to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon; to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.; to a summer course on Shakespeare at Oxford; and to London’s recently rebuilt Globe Theatre. As he pursues his glorious new obsession, Gollob reflects on his family’s bittersweet history, his encounters with writers, and the emergence of a Jewish identity that inspires some original ideas about Shakespeare’s plays. Me and Shakespeare is a joyful memoir that attests to the power of literature to re-invigorate our lives at any age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is a thoroughly engaging account of one man's late-life passion and his attempts, mainly successful, at pitching it to others. At age 67, having retired after a long and distinguished career in publishing, Gollob surprised himself and everyone around him by parlaying his recently acquired fanaticism for the Bard into a position teaching Shakespeare at an elder hostel. The conversion experience had come when Gollob witnessed Ralph Fiennes's acclaimed 1995 Broadway performance in Hamlet. Gollob had already recovered his Jewish roots, having had a bar-mitzvah in middle age; combining his two passions, he began to make connections between the Torah and Shakespeare. After several terms as a popular instructor, Gollob decided he needed to go back to school and enrolled in a short course on Shakespeare at Oxford, where he was so taken with his studies that he quotes big sections of his term paper (a Judaic reading of King Lear) and notes that even though he far exceeds the 15-minute limit for oral reports, his teacher exclaims that she was too rapt by his presentation to interrupt. Gollob fails to distinguish the various voices in his overearnest dialogue, and he has the autodidact's habit of proclaiming as original discoveries that have been generally accepted by scholars for years. But his enthusiasm for his subject is infectious describing a pub meal with fellow Oxford scholars following an eye-opening morning of research, he asks, "Was that the happiest moment of my life or what?" and his boyish zeal comes across as a call to arms to all readers who've ever contemplated changing their lives.