At the Time Warner Center last week, CNN’s financial editor, Myron Kandel, was honored on his retirement and 75th birthday.

The executive vice president of the CNN News Group, Ken Jautz, told those assembled that Mr. Kandel was much too energetic, youthful, and opinionated to retire, and that he is shifting focus rather than getting out of the game altogether. Mr. Kandel will continue to work on books and consult.

With its towering stacks of newspapers and periodicals, Mr. Kandel’s famously cluttered office was the subject of much mirth as Mr. Jautz read a list of the “Top 10 Things You Will Not Hear” Mr. Kandel saying. Examples included “No, that magazine is a year old already, just throw it out,” and “Thanks, but who needs another book?” Mr. Kandel has said his goal was to organize the piles of papers and clip out articles that interested him. Mr. Kandel, one of the founders of CNN, has served as financial editor of three newspapers: the Washington Star, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Post. Mr. Jautz described other posts Mr. Kandel has held, such as foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, covering Germany and the European Common Market. He can speak “five words of really badly accented German to prove it,” Mr. Jautz said.

While finishing his senior year at Brooklyn College, Mr. Kandel started his journalistic career as a copyboy at the New York Times, where he rose to become a financial reporter. Present at the reception was another former Times copyboy: Ambassador Carl Spielvogel, who became head of one of the world’s largest advertising companies.

“Whether you know him as Mike or Myron,” Mr. Jautz said, Mr. Kandel is known as a pioneer as well as “a study of grace under pressure.” He described Mr. Kandel as a supportive colleague who always found time to mentor younger people.

Mr. Kandel was presented with a handsome clock: “Thanks a lot – just when I don’t need it,” he said.

Mr. Kandel reminisced about his career at CNN, recalling Ted Turner saying at the network’s founding that it would stay on until the end of the world – “and if that happens, I expect you to stay on the job and cover the story.”

A letter was read from CNN’s Justice Department correspondent, Kelli Arena, who said Mr. Kandel was a mentor who genuinely celebrates the success of others. She said she learned from Mr. Kandel how, in covering possible wrongdoers, never to forget one was reporting about another human being – somebody’s husband, father, son, or daughter.

Mr. Kandel said it was humbling “to hear all these nice words while I’m still here” and said he was honored to have worked with many of those present. Among the attendees were the anchor of “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” Lou Dobbs; the weekend anchor of CNN’s “Open House,” Gerri Willis, and Reese Schonfeld, author of “Me and Ted Against the World: The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN” (HarperBusiness), and Mr. Kandel’s wife, Thelma.

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CRITICAL ATTENTION

At the National Book Critics Circle awards, held at New School University on Friday, Patrick Neale received the award in criticism for “Where You’re At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet” (Riverhead).The audience laughed when he said, “If I thought I’d the remotest chance of winning, I would have worn my suit. My mother is going to be deeply ashamed.”

A theme among some winners this year was the long time they had worked on their books. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, winners in biography/autobiography for their book “De Kooning: An American Master” (Alfred A. Knopf), labored 13 years. “A lot of that had to do with laziness,” Mr. Stevens added. Marilynne Robinson, who won in the fiction category for “Gilead” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) took even longer to write her book.

In accepting the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, David Orr said he was grateful to “every English teacher I’ve ever had.” He described English literature as an ugly fight in which the great enemy is indifference and not “snarkiness” or nastiness. “This enemy doesn’t care whether you’re a literary critic or a book reviewer. This enemy doesn’t care, period. And we are all – writers, reviewers, readers, teachers – allies against this enemy. Reluctant, squabbling, elbow-throwing allies, maybe. But allies.”

Mr. Orr said honesty as critics, artists and educators is one of the greatest weapons in this battle. He said literature has never been about comfort but about, to quote Robert Frost, a “momentary stay against confusion.” The recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Louis Rubin, entertained the audience with some critical responses from the past. He said it was hard to match the certainty of the opening sentence of Sir Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, describing Wordsworth’s “The Excursion” in 1814: “This will never do.” Mr. Rubin also said he admired Dorothy Parker’s response to one of A.A. Milne’s lesser sequels to Winnie the Pooh – “Tonstant weader fwew up” – and, in “The Smart Set,” H.L. Mencken’s brief, biting comment on Henry James’s 1908 “Views and Reviews”: “Early essays by Henry James – some in the English language.” Mr. Rubin ended by reciting a poem, whose authorship he did not know but always thought embodied the essence of book reviewing:

As I was walking on the green
A Little book I chanced to seen.
Carlyle’s Essay on Burns was the edition
I left it lying in the same position.