The Importance of Not Being Ernest, Mark Kurlansky
The Importance of Not Being Ernest, Mark Kurlansky
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Importance of Not Being Ernest
A Writing Life with an Uninvited Guest

Author: Mark Kurlansky

Narrator: Adam Grupper

Unabridged: 9 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 06/21/2022


Synopsis

An Ernest Hemingway Biography Like No Other

Discover Hemingway’s biography through the eyes of a fellow author and journalist. New York Timesbestselling author of Salt Mark Kurlansky turns his historical eye to the life of Ernest Hemingway. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, The Importance of Not Being Ernest shows the huge shadow Hemingway casts.

The perfect gift for writers. By a series of coincidences, Mark Kurlansky’s life has always been intertwined with Ernest Hemingway's legend, starting with being in Idaho the day of Hemingway’s death. The Importance of Not Being Ernest explores the intersections between Hemingway’s and
Kurlansky’s lives, resulting in creative accounts of two inspiring writing careers. Travel the world with Mark Kurlansky and Ernest Hemingway in this personal memoir, where Kurlansky details his ten years in Paris and his time as a journalist in Spain—both cities important to Hemingway’s adventurous life and prolific writing.

Key West, Havana, and Chicago. Get to know the extraordinary people he met there—those who had also fallen under the Hemingway spell, including a Vietnam veteran suffering from the same syndrome the author did, two winners of the Key West Hemingway look-alike contest, and the man in Idaho who took Hemingway hunting and fishing.

In this unique gift for writers, find:
• A memoir full of entertaining and illuminative stories
• Little-known historical facts about Hemingway’s life
• Anecdotes about those who suffer from what the Kurlansky calls “hemitis”

About Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling and James A. Beard Award–winning author of 1968: The Year That Rocked the World; Salt: A World History; The Basque History of the World; Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; The White Man in the Tree (a collection of short stories); and several other books. Boogaloo on Second Avenue is his first novel. He lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Edward on July 09, 2022

While I was drawn to this book by its occasional insights into Hemingway and his background, the theme is off-putting: It's about where and when Kurlansky crossed paths with Hem's writings or locales. So, we get the author gassing on about Pamplona and Havana, since Hem lived there, or what life is......more

Goodreads review by Peter on May 22, 2023

Interesting perspective on how some of us can't escape Hemingway . . . Kurlansky has a large number of apparently random connections to EH--Spain, Cuba, Idaho, fishing. I have a few myself--Spain, Idaho, fly fishing. Kurlansky interviewed many people in support of his main thesis--that there are no......more

Goodreads review by Clio on April 16, 2023

An uneven one. I happened across this in Waterstone’s and was drawn to the humorous title. It’s a beautiful hardback edition, with soft touch cover and lovely colour reproductions of the author’s own paintings. I had never heard of Mark Kurlansky and never read Hemingway (or really knew much about h......more

Goodreads review by Anne on December 08, 2022

Papa, Hem, Mr Way, Ernie, no matter what name he’s given, Hemingway is truly immortal. And he’s possibly the most “biographied” author in history. Which is why Mark Kurlansky’s book comes as a surprise in that it’s a fresh and revelatory picture of the man behind the legend. Described as an “Ernest......more

Goodreads review by Antonia on July 03, 2023

I really liked this book a lot. It's part memoir and part (mostly) a Hemingway biography. Kurlansky structures it in terms of all the places that Hemingway’s and Kurlansky’s lives have intersected. Not really intersected, since Hemingway died when Kurlansky ws 12 — but there are many places that bot......more