LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Michael Krasny: Book
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Three weeks into his book tour, Michael Krasny’s Off Mike makes it to the Bay Area bestseller list! Krasny has been making appearances in bookstores throughout the Bay Area to packed audiences of the KQED show Forum’s fans, curious to get to know the man behind the mike, the literary radio host they are used to encountering on the air waves on their commutes every morning.
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Michael Krasny, host of KQED's award-winning show Forum, didn't always want to be a radio host. In his new book, Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life, he explains how he went from dreaming of writing novels himself, to interviewing the authors who write them.
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Unlike many in the highly polarized world of talk radio, during his interviews Krasny is, in his words, "blessed or cursed with the ability to see both sides" of many political issues. What his book cannot convey is Krasny's consummate skill as an interviewer, especially compared with, for example, his depressingly doctrinaire NPR colleagues Terry Gross and Diane Rehm, the cloying Barbara Walters and the brain-dead Larry King.
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The book takes readers inside Krasny’s world—his coming of age during the heady times of the 1960s with their blend of the civil rights movement, political activism, and sexual experimentation. Krasny talks of a strong desire to become a novelist in the footsteps of Saul Bellow and Philip
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The organization of the book - lengthy autobiographical passages in chronological order interspersed with brief impressions and recollections of some of Krasny's most memorable radio interviews - is very effective. The juxtapositions play off one another nicely.
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"We take what talents we can, and the book is about that in some ways," Krasny says. "Maybe I was lucky that I didn't become a novelist because there are writers who are tortured by it."
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