Michiko kakutani biography books

American critic, writer (b. 1955)

Michiko Kakutani (ミチコ・カクタニ, 角谷美智子, born January 9, 1955) is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.

Early life and family

Kakutani, a Japanese American, was born on January 9, 1955, in New Haven, Connecticut. She is the only child of Yale mathematicianShizuo Kakutani and Keiko "Kay" Uchida. Her father was born in Japan, and her mother was a second-generation Japanese-American who was raised in Berkeley, California. Kakutani's aunt, Yoshiko Uchida, was an author of children's books. Kakutani received her bachelor's degree in English literature from Yale University in 1976, where she studied under author and Yale writing professor John Hersey, among others.

Career

Kakutani initially worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, and then from 1977 to 1979 for Time magazine, where Hersey had worked. In 1979, she joined The New York Times as a reporter.

Literary critic

Kakutani was a literary critic for The New York Times from 1983 until her retirement in 2017. She gained particular notoriety for her sometimes-biting reviews of books from famous authors, with Slate remarking that "her name became a verb, and publishers have referred to her negative reviews as 'getting Kakutani'ed'".

Many authors who received such reviews gave harsh public responses: in 2006, Kakutani called Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass." Franzen subsequently called Kakutani "the stupidest person in New York City". In 2012, Kakutani wrote a negative review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile. In 2018, Taleb stated in his book Skin in the Game that "someone has to have read th