George Canaris, a writing professor on the verge of retirement at a small college in Ohio, is killed by a hit-and-run driver. Upon his death, Mark May, a young English professor who barely knew him finds himself named as Canaris's literary executor & begins to search through lifes & letters that is at once gripping, hilarious & affirming.
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George Canaris, a writing professor on the verge of retirement at a small college in Ohio, is killed by a hit-and-run driver. Upon his death, Mark May, a young English professor who barely knew him finds himself named as Canaris's literary executor & begins to search through lifes & letters that is at once gripping, hilarious & affirming.
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Add this copy of Gone Tomorrow to cart. $1.73, very good condition, Sold by PlumCircle rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from West Mifflin, PA, UNITED STATES, published 2010 by Duckworth & Co.
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Set in a small liberal arts college in an even smaller Ohio town, this book examines the strained fit of a celebrity writer/professor among purely academic types, the diminishment of the currency of celebrity, and the willingness of college administrators to succumb to public relations and superficial measures to enhance their and the college's image, even at the expense of long-time employees. And then there are the joys, frustrations, and difficulties of teaching with the necessity of delivering the news to students that their high school teachers had much oversold their talents and beginning their education from the ground up.
George Canaris was starting to get a reputation as a superb writer in the 1960s, having published two well-received books and being well-known around Hollywood circles. His acceptance of an offer to teach in an obscure Ohio town in the early 1970s seemed odd, unlikely to last, but the wild card in his move was the pressure to write another outstanding book. Would a small college town be inspirational or did it represent an avenue for escape? Prof Canaris settled into the small town, gaining a small group of friends, and found enjoyment in the occasional student with a gift for writing. While not a womanizer, per se, his intellectual, paternalistic role was attractive to female students resulting in one ten year relationship. The prospective book referred to as The Beast lurked, however, a subject for many to ponder, which clouded his relationships and standing with the college.
It's not a spoiler to say that the first line of the book refers to Canaris' flattering obit in the NY Times, which propels the book into his past including a search for the mysterious The Beast by his literary executor. What is found rather quickly is a memoir written by Canaris over the last year after his forced retirement and his various rounds of ceremonial appearances, some of which backfired on the college. The memoir is actually the main part of this book - a book within a book -and details Canaris' teaching and his last year, but also reveals that he conceived of The Beast as being concerned with the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Carlsbad of the Czech Republic in 1938 and the travails of those who escaped or did not. Perhaps The Beast is more illusion than reality, but the reader gets to share his thinking as Canaris makes two visits to Carlsbad.
Canaris is a good fellow but remains rather enigmatic: his motivations, relationships, plans, etc. Yet, the book is very readable and revelatory about the environment that those who would choose the college life are likely to encounter: politics, dilemmas, constraints, pressures, and the like. Interestingly, the author provides a certain amount of commentary on various writers as to their being overrated or underrated.
