Customer Reviews

Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life

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Michael Krasny's new book, Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life is one of the best books I have read. Michael Krasny is an icon to San Franciscan's, not because of his accumulated fame as a radio talk show host and English professor, but because of his big heart. In his book, Krasny answers many philosophical questions about life. His words enlighten and inspire us, making us all the more peaceful in the process.

Krasny teaches us lessons from his sixty years. For example, he teaches readers how to be a good listeners in order to enrich our lives, be polite, let people speak and not dominate every conversation. We also learn about his thoughts abhorring racism and how he embraces equality and feminism.

Krasny's personal story is fascinating because it involves transformation. Krasny tells of his humble beginnings in Cleveland Heights surrounded by bigotry and anti-Semitism. We watch his rise to radio fame and at the same time get a survey of world literature. His life lessons, adventures on radio and in the classroom are intercut with vignettes of time spent on and off the radio with the greatest names in literature in the 20th century, Bellows Mamet, Didion, Kingsolver, Hong Kingston, Tan, Coppola, Ishiguro, Smiley, Angelou, and Allende.

Krasny intuits that everyone wants to be a storyteller, and that if our hearts are open and our minds are quiet, we will see that everyone has something to share and teach others.

Krasny's show, KQED's `Forum' and his book have a distinctive truth to them. Krasny reveals things we often do not talk about in everyday life.

Among Krasny's hi-lites:

Interviews are an intimate exchange between the person being interviewed and the interviewer, an exchange that profits society. The interviews are also a gift to the person being interviewed. An interview gives a person a voice and opens the door for them to have a transformative experience. I witness that on a daily basis. I'm an oral historian and many of the interviews I conducted were with Holocaust survivors, who consistently look ten years younger after they were interviewed. We all need to tell our stories.

Krasny explains that people have better lives if they improve their listening skills. If someone is a good listener, they'll experience life at a deeper level.

By studying these very same issues myself for decades and after reading Krasny's book, I realize that I am continuously training myself to be still and pay attention to everything around me. With this kind of quiet energy, we can develop the ability to help society. Listening, according to Krasny, bears the fruit of compassion. I see now that I can now sit through long meetings, or aggressive situations and feel cool and calm, if I listen well. I don't need to feel aggressive and agitated myself. I'm delighted to see that I've learned something from all the interviews I conducted! I had not realized how much I transform from the interviewing process until I read Krasny's book.

So if you are an oral historian, or a lover of books, or a professional or amateur interviewer, or a radio talk show host, or just a person who wants to keep rising up, read Off Mike.

Have listened to and appreciated Michael Krasny (Dr Krasny in our home since he has a PhD) since he was at KGO 810 ABC in San Francisco and since he joined KQED FM San Francisco. Have a called in to both programs and have been honoured to have done some email back and forth.

What makes this book a gem for anyone who loves him on radio (KQED's Forum) is how the book helps his listeners better appreciate the man and how he has evolved and become for some of us a gifted bibliophile who colours outside the lines. Unlike so many interviewers he asks damn interesting questions and shuts up long enough to let his guests answer.

And then having actually listened to his guest, he then is able to ask better and better questions. And I appreciate how even handed he is with his guests no matter their political, religious, sexual etc leanings. Doesn't mean he's a sappy interviewers, but simply one who seems to understand that one can get more by being a thoughtful adult vs a smart a**.

He has turned me on (pun intended) to publications like Yellow Silk to serious political, religious, bios and science works. My late husband used to smile and shake his head when the UPS guy would deliver books each week that I had bought from Amazon, which I had heard about on Michael Krasny's show.

What makes this biography different is:
(a) the stellar use of vocabulary
(b) the book's structure - each chapter of life starts with biography and ends with Michael's opinions of roughly 3 interview subjects (mainly authors)

I am not a big fan of fiction - preferring the real to the made-up. However, I may get round to reading some, based on Michael's enthusiasm for literature. For, besides being a biography, this book is a highly readable introduction to contemporary authors and literature. It's a great book to have around when you are thinking "What shall I read next?" or "Who's a famous author that I really ought to know more about?".

It's about finding one's purpose in life too - should one try to be a writer, a broadcaster or a professor, or all three? Should one try to go on national radio or stay in funky California? Thankfully, podcasting makes the latter question irrelevant!

I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about:
(a) being a radio interviewer
(b) contemporary authors and books
(c) how to enrich one's vocabulary - there were plenty of new words for me in the book
(d) Mike behind the mike
(e) the difference growing up in Cleveland and living in the San Francisco Bay area
(f) inter-personal relationships with school friends, bosses or colleagues

A very enjoyable read.

Michael Krasny should consider writing more books. This book is an interesting pleasure from the beginning.
Mr. Krasny has added an enriched layer to his radio shows. I wish that I had known about his KGO shows from the past. I particularly liked reading about his life in the Bay Area because I live here. The picture he painted of the NPR studios was quite a surprise. s

For many of us in the San Francisco Bay Area, the hours between 9-11 am Monday through Friday are devoted to listening to Forum with Michael Krasny on KQED public radio. After reading Off Mike, I experience the program with even greater enjoyment and interest. The man behind the interviewer's voice has revealed himself in this book.

Off Mike is an honest, engaging, heart-on-the-sleeve look at the author's lifelong ambition to be a `great novelist', while he slowly realizes that he is meant to be doing the work he does. I am continually impressed with the breadth and depth of Krasny's familiarity with the work of the people he interviews, the respect he shows them and the balance he strikes between opposing points of view.

Off Mike is an immensely enjoyable read by a man who has a way with words - spoken and written.

"Off-Mike" is in part a memoir of Krasny's path from school kid to a very skilled radio interviewer who has a great passion for the intellect. The book is also in part the summary of one interview and encounter after another with some pretty darned amazing people- Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Saul Bellow, Francis Ford Coppola, Isabel Allende, Alice Walker...well, you name it. So, it's not surprising that it's a great read- Krasny's writing about what he knows, that within which he's spent his entire life.

But, there's so much more than that in this book. Krasny takes a very personal and interesting approach to the summaries of interviews. They are not just taken verbatim from transcripts, but are written interspersed with Krasny's reactions- to the ideas of his interlocutors, and to their moods, personality, tact, the events of their lives and their courteous (or discourteous) treatment of their host (ie Krasny himself.) In this way Krasny paints a full portrait of the humanness of these artists. Pretty cool.

I thought this book was agony to read. Do we really care about how Krasny lost his virginity? Little puns that are dandy on the radio lie like dead fish on the page. He is a fine radio interviewer, but I found little to recommend this book. He should stick to what he does best.