14 Facts About Michiko Kakutani

Michiko Kakutani was born on January 9,1955 and is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017.

Michiko Kakutani is the only child of Yale mathematician Shizuo Kakutani and his wife Keiko Uchida.

Michiko Kakutani's father was born in Japan, her mother was a second-generation Japanese-American who was raised in Berkeley, California.

Michiko Kakutani's aunt, Yoshiko Uchida, was an author of children's books.

Michiko Kakutani received her bachelor's degree in English literature from Yale University in 1976, where she studied under author and Yale writing professor John Hersey, among others.

Michiko Kakutani initially worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, and then from 1977 to 1979 for Time magazine, where Hersey had worked.

Michiko Kakutani was a literary critic for The New York Times from 1983 until her retirement in 2017.

Michiko Kakutani gained particular notoriety for her sometimes-biting reviews of books from famous authors, with Slate remarking that "her name became a verb, and publishers have referred to her negative reviews as 'getting Kakutani'ed'".

In 2012, Michiko Kakutani wrote a negative review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile.

In 2018, Taleb stated in his book Skin in the Game that "someone has to have read the book to notice that a reviewer is full of baloney, so in the absence of skin in the game, reviewers such as Michiko Kakutani" can "go on forever without anyone knowing" that they are fabricating and drunk.

Michiko Kakutani has been known to write reviews in the voice of movie or book characters, including Brian Griffin, Austin Powers, Holden Caulfield, Elle Woods of Legally Blonde, and Truman Capote's character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Michiko Kakutani announced that she was stepping down as chief book critic of the Times on July 27,2017.

In 2018, Michiko Kakutani published a book criticizing the Trump administration titled The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.

However, upon the publication of The Death of Truth, Michiko Kakutani began giving interviews to print outlets, though she declined to appear on television.