Maestros & Monsters

 Starred  Review + Named to KIRKUS “Best Books of 2023  for Nonfiction”

                      “A nimble, eminently readable tribute to a pair of literary giants who  weren’t shy of calling themselves such.”

“The species of intransigence that Robert Boyers admired in Sontag and Steiner, the friction-fed belief that sentences were not just scribbles, not just faulty transcriptions of reality — they were reality. . . . For that he forgave them almost everything. And in this vivid affectionate, quietly combative book he persuades the reader to do the same.—James Marcus, TLS [Times Literary Supplement]

“One of the most wince-inducing scenes in Maestros & Monsters takes place on a bus to an academic conference, where Sontag kept saying hello to Steiner, louder and louder, as he stared out the window, refusing to answer. Boyers blames their falling out on Sontag’s failure to thank or repay Steiner after he obtained some rare books she asked for. But the whole episode sounds like it could have taken place in a kindergarten…. Boyers’ account of his idols’ bad behavior suggests the wisdom of this policy. Such anecdotes make Boyers’ book delicious reading for connoisseurs of gossip about intellectuals.—Adam Kirsch, Jewish Review of Books

“Robert Boyers has made in this sometimes brutally honest but always loving memoir of his difficult friends a moving contribution to the history of our intellectual culture. Boyers and his wife, the poet Peg Boyers, were for decades deeply involved with Sontag and Steiner’s work, no less when they disagreed with them. What Sontag called ‘the dramaturgy of ideas’ and ‘the dramaturgy of feeling’ flow together in Boyers’ portrait of brilliance and vulnerabilities, and the life of the mind as human passion.” – Darryl Pinckney

“Robert Boyers has managed not only to draw extraordinarily vivid portrayals of two writer-critics, but also to add a third portrait: that of the author himself, who plays a sort of wry pragmatic Sancho Panza role to these two disputatious Knights of Intellect. A thrillingly generous book, it deserves to be seen as following in the grand tradition of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Sainte-Beuve’s biographical sketches and Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences.”—Phillip Lopate

“This superb book takes us back to the last moments of the golden age of American letters. Despite inescapable faults and foibles of these figures, Robert Boyers lays bare with wisdom and wit their absolute commitment to the life of the mind and majesty of the intellectual vocation. His own profound capacity for friendship animates and elevates this fascinating book.” — Cornel West 

“Robert Boyers possesses a rare genius for friendship, and above all his book is a testament to friendship as a way of life, and as the medium in which thinking thrives. I loved it.” — Garth Greenwell  

Maestros & Monsters is not merely about the bad behavior of a couple of intellectuals. (How bad could they be, anyway, compared to actors, financiers, or rock stars?) Boyers delivers the gossip, but he also makes a serious case for the importance of Sontag and Steiner. Both were proudly independent and unafraid to dissent. They were a different species from today’s intellectuals, who run with the herd, largely conforming to progressivism’s neo-Stalinist orthodoxy.—David Mikics, ‘The Last Jewish Intellectuals,’ Tablet