It was the scream—and the shower scene—heard ’round the world. Just 40 minutes into Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, we watch—horrified but rapt—as Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) is stabbed to death in the shower stall of the now infamous Bates Hotel. At first we think Norman Bates’ mentally deranged mother is the murderer, but we come to realize that there is no Mrs. Bates—or no living Mrs. Bates—and that Norman himself (played pitch-perfectly by Anthony Perkins) is the true psycho.
Just how Hitchcock created his masterpiece—and what it did to change the landscape of American filmmaking and audience perception in the 1960s and beyond—is the subject of film critic David Thomson’s authoritative The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder. Thomson’s detailed and insightful primer is the perfect book for Hitchcock aficionados and general film fans alike.
It was the scream—and the shower scene—heard ’round the world. Just 40 minutes into Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, we watch—horrified but rapt—as Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) is stabbed to death in the shower stall of the now infamous Bates Hotel. At first we think…
In its own way, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point exemplifies its subtitle: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, tells the stories of seemingly minor incidents that build to matters of great consequence. The tipping point, Gladwell writes, is the moment at which an idea catches on and spreads. He uses the metaphor of epidemics to describe these events, posing the questions, Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?
Part of the effectiveness of The Tipping Point lies in the intriguing illustrations Gladwell uses to explain his ideas. Chapters focus on such epidemic catalysts as Paul Revere, cigarettes, the Columbia House gold record advertising campaign, "Sesame Street," Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, subway shooter Bernie Goetz, teen suicide in Micronesia and Airwalk sneakers.
These examples serve to illustrate Gladwell’s three components of the Tipping Point, which he calls The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. As diverse as these topics are, Gladwell manages both to maintain the specificity of each example and apply it usefully to his Tipping Point theories. The Bernie Goetz case, for example, illustrates what Gladwell calls the Power of Context, which argues that the psychological or sociological backgrounds of Goetz and the youths on the train have less to do with what happened than their environment. Gladwell argues that the eventually historically significant altercation had everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles. The Power of Context says you don’t have to solve the big problems to solve crime. Instead, cleaning up the subway system can help.
The Tipping Point alternates between daunting and heartening in what it asks its readers to do and understand; as Gladwell writes, What must underlie successful epidemics is a bedrock belief that change is possible. That faith is often elusive. After reading Gladwell’s book, however, and comprehending exactly what Paul Revere’s ride and the Columbia House advertising campaign have in common, the world around us seems eminently ripe for tipping for the better.
Eliza McGraw teaches English at Vanderbilt University.
In its own way, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point exemplifies its subtitle: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, tells the stories of seemingly minor incidents that build to matters of great consequence. The tipping point,…
The eyes have it Mother’s birthday? Nephew’s graduation? Second cousin twice removed’s wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you’ve come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books, of course! Do you know someone who is so trendy that when they go shopping, they think their clothes are out of style before they can get them to the cash register? Laugh and learn with Holly Brubach’s A Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Phaidon, $29.95, 071483887X). A collection of 27 essays published during the past two decades, Brubach’s writings offer insight on trends, designers, models, and photographers. There are chapters dedicated to men, shoes, visionaries, and plus-sizes. Luckily, the photographs featured were carefully selected, so some of fashion’s . . . er, more outrageous phases are kept within the text. It is a witty, educated observation that isn’t muddled into tedium or grandiosity. Brubach takes a scenic route from Paris to New York, with plenty of stops along the way.
One hundred and five years ago, a subtitle reading An Illustrated Monthly was added to the masthead of National Geographic. Since then, photographs featured in the magazine have told stories that reflect our world and the times in which we live. Beginning with those early photographs, six authors have compiled an era-by-era account of the 20th century in National Geographic Photographs: The Milestones (National Geographic Society, $50, 0792275209). Often working in rigorous or rudimentary settings, many of the photographers featured are true pioneers of photojournalism. Look on the wedding portrait of a late 19th-century Zulu couple; observe the conditions of an early 20th-century Mexican cigarette factory; visit Lappland, New York, the Arctic, and scores of other places and events that were hallmarks of the past century. Very often, photographers would return to a previous site with mixed results; progress is evident in many of these revisits, while other photographs reflect areas that remain untouched by time.
If breathtaking scenery and colorful history excites someone on your gift list, you can’t do much better than Scotland. Checkmark Books has captured the majesty and mystery of this gorgeous country in Heritage of Scotland: A Cultural History of Scotland and Its People ($29.95, 06003552609). Author Nathaniel Harris’s enormous undertaking covers everything from Scotland’s landscape to its literary offerings. Beautiful artwork and photographs are featured alongside an abundance of information about Scottish people and their traditions. And yes, clans, kilts, and bagpipes are included, but readers will soon discover there is so much more! Visit the Highland Games, look at priceless works of art, learn the complex linguistic history of the Scottish people, observe the country’s most famous structures, many dating back to prehistoric times. Heritage of Scotland is a great item for history buffs and anyone with Scottish roots.
It’s a classic dilemma: You’re standing in the video store, thinking, What’s that movie from the 1940s, the one where John Wayne plays a naval officer and has an affair with a nurse, played by Donna Reed? This dilemma is easily resolved with VideoHound’s War Movies: Classic Conflict on Film. Mike Mayo has compiled and arranged over 200 war movies according to the war depicted. This guide includes many documentaries and overlooked films, like The Fighting Sullivans and Come and See. There are sidebars profiling famous actors, listings of full movie credits, and 200 photographs to peruse. Mayo provides commentary and synopsis for each film, mentioning the controversies and histories surrounding some of Hollywood’s most powerful movies. Amid trivia and quotes, Mayo is kind enough to include a See Also section for each film, for moviewatchers who are interested in other films that are similar in content, direction, or have the same stars . . . just in case your first choice has been rented out!
The eyes have it Mother's birthday? Nephew's graduation? Second cousin twice removed's wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you've come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books,…
s for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate look at the life of a multifaceted figure. Told in graphic black and white, King’s story unfolds in a series of photographs, some of which have never been seen before, and the result is a visual retrospective almost as mighty as the man himself.
Photographer Bob Adelman assembled the starkly beautiful, sobering images that comprise this volume, and it’s a detailed compilation that spans more than a decade. With authoritative text written by National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, this in-depth look at one of our most revered leaders is organized around the major events in King’s life, from the 1957 prayer pilgrimage in Washington, D.C., to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Oslo in 1964. But most touching are the simple moments in which the great man seems mortal: King dozing in a chair in an airport; struggling over the composition of a sermon; having a strained moment at home with his wife Coretta. While documenting the life of King, the book also captures the essence of a violent epoch, presenting the triumphs and trials that characterized the civil rights movement and doing so with an intensity that makes the events of the ’50s and ’60s feel strangely immediate. Most importantly, King penetrates the surface of its subject, presenting both the public and the private sides of an icon, a superman of sorts who was, after all, human.
Black history is at the reader’s fingertips with Velma Maia Thomas’ ingenious three-dimensional book Freedom’s Children: The Passage from Emancipation to the Great Migration. The second volume in a series chronicling black history and the sequel to Thomas’ best-selling Lest We Forget, Freedom’s Children addresses the years following the Civil War, examining the challenges faced by slaves tasting liberty for the first time. With illustrations, photographs and one-of-a-kind interactive elements, this intriguing book requires reader participation. A letter from a Freedmen’s Bureau agent is tucked into an envelope. A miniature version of The Freedmen’s Third Reader a primer studied by illiterate slaves invites perusal. A ticket for the Colorado and Southern Railway, which bore freedmen and freedwomen west in search of better lives, and script money folded into pockets lend an air of authenticity to Thomas’ narrative, making Freedom’s Children something of a fold-out museum, a mini-archive. Thomas’ illuminating text, which follows the lives of former slaves, along with the replicas of documents and artifacts that illustrate the era, make Freedom’s Children both an invaluable work of scholarship and a beautiful gift volume.
A book that delivers the nobility, beauty and dignity of the world’s most mysterious continent, Sensual Africa by photographer Joe Wuerfel captures the essence of a place and its people in pictures that are sheer poetry. Wuerfel visited the Cape Verde Islands, Tanzania and Namibia, where he lived among a nomadic tribe of herdsmen called the Himba, and the results are images tempered by a golden tint, photographs that have the warm haze of yellowed lace, of something aged. Dressed in calfskin loincloths and beaded belts, the bodies of the Himba seem burnished. At times, in this light, Africa itself appears apocalyptic a landscape yellow-white, barren and bone-dry in which zebras look otherworldly, and black baobab trees stand like supplicants beneath an unyielding sky. In his travels through Africa, Wuerfel captured archetypal images of the masculine and the feminine, of youth and age. Young Himba girls flirty yet demure seem to be sharing a secret; Tanzanian women mourn, their heads shaven in honor of the dead; a bare-chested Himba boy runs with a bow and arrow. Foreign yet familiar, the postures of these isolated people transcend language and culture and remind us of what it means to be human. In their gestures, we can see ourselves.
An interview with photographer Peter Beard, who has spent 25 years on the continent, is also included in Sensual Africa. A remarkable visual experience, this is a stunning volume that Africaphiles will love.
s for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate…
The eyes have it Mother’s birthday? Nephew’s graduation? Second cousin twice removed’s wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you’ve come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books, of course! Do you know someone who is so trendy that when they go shopping, they think their clothes are out of style before they can get them to the cash register? Laugh and learn with Holly Brubach’s A Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Phaidon, $29.95, 071483887X). A collection of 27 essays published during the past two decades, Brubach’s writings offer insight on trends, designers, models, and photographers. There are chapters dedicated to men, shoes, visionaries, and plus-sizes. Luckily, the photographs featured were carefully selected, so some of fashion’s . . . er, more outrageous phases are kept within the text. It is a witty, educated observation that isn’t muddled into tedium or grandiosity. Brubach takes a scenic route from Paris to New York, with plenty of stops along the way.
One hundred and five years ago, a subtitle reading An Illustrated Monthly was added to the masthead of National Geographic. Since then, photographs featured in the magazine have told stories that reflect our world and the times in which we live. Beginning with those early photographs, six authors have compiled an era-by-era account of the 20th century in National Geographic Photographs: The Milestones. Often working in rigorous or rudimentary settings, many of the photographers featured are true pioneers of photojournalism. Look on the wedding portrait of a late 19th-century Zulu couple; observe the conditions of an early 20th-century Mexican cigarette factory; visit Lappland, New York, the Arctic, and scores of other places and events that were hallmarks of the past century. Very often, photographers would return to a previous site with mixed results; progress is evident in many of these revisits, while other photographs reflect areas that remain untouched by time.
If breathtaking scenery and colorful history excites someone on your gift list, you can’t do much better than Scotland. Checkmark Books has captured the majesty and mystery of this gorgeous country in Heritage of Scotland: A Cultural History of Scotland and Its People ($29.95, 06003552609). Author Nathaniel Harris’s enormous undertaking covers everything from Scotland’s landscape to its literary offerings. Beautiful artwork and photographs are featured alongside an abundance of information about Scottish people and their traditions. And yes, clans, kilts, and bagpipes are included, but readers will soon discover there is so much more! Visit the Highland Games, look at priceless works of art, learn the complex linguistic history of the Scottish people, observe the country’s most famous structures, many dating back to prehistoric times. Heritage of Scotland is a great item for history buffs and anyone with Scottish roots.
It’s a classic dilemma: You’re standing in the video store, thinking, What’s that movie from the 1940s, the one where John Wayne plays a naval officer and has an affair with a nurse, played by Donna Reed? This dilemma is easily resolved with VideoHound’s War Movies: Classic Conflict on Film (Visible Ink, $19.95, 1578590892). Mike Mayo has compiled and arranged over 200 war movies according to the war depicted. This guide includes many documentaries and overlooked films, like The Fighting Sullivans and Come and See. There are sidebars profiling famous actors, listings of full movie credits, and 200 photographs to peruse. Mayo provides commentary and synopsis for each film, mentioning the controversies and histories surrounding some of Hollywood’s most powerful movies. Amid trivia and quotes, Mayo is kind enough to include a See Also section for each film, for moviewatchers who are interested in other films that are similar in content, direction, or have the same stars . . . just in case your first choice has been rented out!
The eyes have it Mother's birthday? Nephew's graduation? Second cousin twice removed's wedding? If you need help selecting a gift for any occasion, you've come to the right place. What gift is always the right color, the right size, and the right price? Why, books,…
Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate look at the life of a multifaceted figure. Told in graphic black and white, King’s story unfolds in a series of photographs, some of which have never been seen before, and the result is a visual retrospective almost as mighty as the man himself.
Photographer Bob Adelman assembled the starkly beautiful, sobering images that comprise this volume, and it’s a detailed compilation that spans more than a decade. With authoritative text written by National Book Award winner Charles Johnson, this in-depth look at one of our most revered leaders is organized around the major events in King’s life, from the 1957 prayer pilgrimage in Washington, D.C., to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Oslo in 1964. But most touching are the simple moments in which the great man seems mortal: King dozing in a chair in an airport; struggling over the composition of a sermon; having a strained moment at home with his wife Coretta. While documenting the life of King, the book also captures the essence of a violent epoch, presenting the triumphs and trials that characterized the civil rights movement and doing so with an intensity that makes the events of the ’50s and ’60s feel strangely immediate. Most importantly, King penetrates the surface of its subject, presenting both the public and the private sides of an icon, a superman of sorts who was, after all, human.
Black history is at the reader’s fingertips with Velma Maia Thomas’ ingenious three-dimensional book Freedom’s Children: The Passage from Emancipation to the Great Migration . The second volume in a series chronicling black history and the sequel to Thomas’ best-selling Lest We Forget, Freedom’s Children addresses the years following the Civil War, examining the challenges faced by slaves tasting liberty for the first time. With illustrations, photographs and one-of-a-kind interactive elements, this intriguing book requires reader participation. A letter from a Freedmen’s Bureau agent is tucked into an envelope. A miniature version of The Freedmen’s Third Reader a primer studied by illiterate slaves invites perusal. A ticket for the Colorado and Southern Railway, which bore freedmen and freedwomen west in search of better lives, and script money folded into pockets lend an air of authenticity to Thomas’ narrative, making Freedom’s Children something of a fold-out museum, a mini-archive. Thomas’ illuminating text, which follows the lives of former slaves, along with the replicas of documents and artifacts that illustrate the era, make Freedom’s Children both an invaluable work of scholarship and a beautiful gift volume.
A book that delivers the nobility, beauty and dignity of the world’s most mysterious continent, Sensual Africa by photographer Joe Wuerfel captures the essence of a place and its people in pictures that are sheer poetry. Wuerfel visited the Cape Verde Islands, Tanzania and Namibia, where he lived among a nomadic tribe of herdsmen called the Himba, and the results are images tempered by a golden tint, photographs that have the warm haze of yellowed lace, of something aged. Dressed in calfskin loincloths and beaded belts, the bodies of the Himba seem burnished. At times, in this light, Africa itself appears apocalyptic a landscape yellow-white, barren and bone-dry in which zebras look otherworldly, and black baobab trees stand like supplicants beneath an unyielding sky. In his travels through Africa, Wuerfel captured archetypal images of the masculine and the feminine, of youth and age. Young Himba girls flirty yet demure seem to be sharing a secret; Tanzanian women mourn, their heads shaven in honor of the dead; a bare-chested Himba boy runs with a bow and arrow. Foreign yet familiar, the postures of these isolated people transcend language and culture and remind us of what it means to be human. In their gestures, we can see ourselves.
An interview with photographer Peter Beard, who has spent 25 years on the continent, is also included in Sensual Africa. A remarkable visual experience, this is a stunning volume that Africaphiles will love.
Gifts for Black History Month Revisiting an era that rent the nation, King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the perfect way for readers to commemorate Black History Month. The first of its kind and a wonderful gift book, King is an intimate…
Debbie Millman couldn’t have predicted that when she debuted her “Design Matters” podcast in 2005, it would so deeply satisfy her soul. Podcasts were brand-new in the early 2000s, so the show was a let’s-try-this-and-see endeavor, a creative experiment that she felt primed to conduct. “I had achieved a great deal,” she writes in the introduction to Why Design Matters: Conversations With the World’s Most Creative People, “but there was an echoing vacuum of meaning and purpose in my life.”
Certainly, Millman has an impressive resume as a design leader, serving clients like 7UP, Burger King and Star Wars during her 20 years at the helm of Sterling Brands; co-founding the graduate program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York City; writing six previous books; placing her art in museums as well as in the New York Times and Fast Company; and much more.
In its early years, the podcast was “very much a show about graphic design, graphic designers talking to graphic designers, very inside baseball,” Millman says during a phone call to the Manhattan brownstone she shares with her wife, author Roxane Gay. But as Millman shifted her focus from looking at human behavior through the lens of branding to instead connecting with individuals, people responded. They wanted in, both as listeners and interviewees, and her interviews quickly became a central element of her life and a pursuit that has been endlessly fascinating and rewarding.
“The show evolved in two ways,” she reflects. “First, my courage in reaching out to people increased. And then I also started getting publicists reaching out to me about their clients being on the show, or fans I didn’t know were fans wanting to be on the show.”
These interviewee-fans, more than 450 of them (and counting) over the course of 16 years (and counting), run the creative gamut. They’re standouts in the fields of design, writing, fine art, street art, acting, music, marketing, cooking—and the list goes on. Each guest is smart, thoughtful and, most importantly, game to join Millman on a conversational journey from childhood to adulthood, from past to present. They’re open to plumbing the sometimes painful events, decisions and emotions that have shaped what they do and who they’ve become.
“They’ve lived their lives so differently, and the ways they’ve coped with obstacles have been so varied.”
For Why Design Matters, characterized in its introduction as “a love letter to creativity, a testament to the power of curiosity,” Millman distills that library of interviews into 50-plus Q&A conversations in five categories: Legends, Truth Tellers, Culture Makers, Trendsetters and Visionaries.
Choosing 50 interviews from more than 450 was a challenge for Millman. “I ended up going through all of them in one way or another, whether it be listening or transcribing and reading,” she says. “I wanted there to be a timelessness to what they were talking about . . . [and] an evergreen quality to the interviews, so they could be relevant whenever they were being read and experienced.”
The book’s veritable parade of fascinating, accomplished people begins with late design legend Milton Glaser (best known for his “I Heart NY” logo) and ends with Eve Ensler (who now goes by “V”) of The Vagina Monologues fame, with the likes of Alison Bechdel, Chanel Miller, Malcolm Gladwell, Amanda Palmer, Saeed Jones, Marina Abramović and David Byrne occupying the pages in between. Millman points to how each interviewee has shaped their career, life and body of work with fierce individuality. “They’ve lived their lives so differently,” she says, “and the ways they’ve coped with obstacles have been so varied.”
For example, James Beard Award-winning chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton (Blood, Bones & Butter) reveals that in opening her restaurant, Prune, she set aside her long-held dream of writing fiction. Shepard Fairey, known for his OBEY street art, talks politics and explains why he won’t call himself an artist. And in discussing her short stories, Carmen Maria Machado quips that “a novel is like being beat up over the course of a day, and a short story is like one punch to the nose.”
There are full-page portraits and illustrations, playful type treatments and blocks of text that don’t always go in a straight line, just like in any good conversation. Millman has previously compared a successful interview to a game of pool, but through the design of this book, a new metaphor comes forward: the scribble. Striking hand-drawn scribbles scrawled by Millman herself appear on the cover and throughout the book, hinting toward the notion of interplay, of thoughts and conversational paths that ricochet off and tumble toward one another. “For me, [the scribble] really portrays conceptually the arc of a conversation,” she says. “You know it could go anywhere; it could be an infinite loop. It is an infinite loop!”
Another infinite pursuit, of course, is creativity itself. But where does creative success come from? What pushes a person into the stratosphere of, per the book’s subtitle, the “World’s Most Creative People”? Millman believes it’s “faith in their own work, self-awareness of what they’re capable of and a relentless sort of restlessness, a real restlessness about constantly evolving and growing and uncovering new ground.”
That restlessness is something Millman also possesses, whether she’s learning from her compassionate exploration of the human condition in her “Design Matters” interviews, working with students at the School of Visual Arts or pursuing her ever-percolating new projects.
“There are so many things I want to do,” Millman says, “including two more books I have in mind. Stirrings of a lot of different new things I want to try.” But she demurs at the thought of including herself on a “Most Creative” list: “I think I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to earn that title.”
Photo of Debbie Millman by John Madere
In Why Design Matters, Debbie Millman dives deep into revelatory conversations from her groundbreaking podcast.
Unwrapping the past Certainly not everything in the world is getting better and better, but illustrated books may well be. Color reproduction gets ever more precise and lush, and no book demonstrates this better than what is hands-down the most beautiful book on King Tut ever published Tutankhamun, with text by T.G.H. James and photographs by A. De Luca. James was for a long time Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, and De Luca is considered one of the foremost photographers of jewelry and statuary in the world. The text is vivid and comprehensive, and explains many aspects of the story of the boy king, but the words are attendant upon the text in this volume. Primarily they serve as detailed captions for De Luca’s breathtaking photographs. The pictures capture the sheen of gold and lapis, the details of texture and inlay, as never before. From the quartz-eyed, ivory-toothed hippo beside the king’s bed to a gold-beaded bracelet with an amethyst scarab, the range of shameless opulence is amazing. Every time you turn the page you find another close-up view of a work of art demonstrating staggering workmanship. No fan of ancient Egypt, and certainly no Tutophile, will be able to resist this book.
While you’re in an Egyptian mood, you should turn to another beautiful new book, Valley of the Golden Mummies, by Zahi Hawass (Abrams, $49.50, ISBN ). Hawass is Egypt’s undersecretary of state for the Giza Monuments. He has made many discoveries of his own, including the tombs of the workers who built the pyramids, the tombs of some of Khufu’s officials and evidence about how the pyramids were built. He also directed the conservation of the Great Sphinx at Giza. Many artifacts appear in this book’s impressive illustrations, but there is also much more to round out the story. Handsome color photographs document excavations, restorations, tomb sites and many other fascinating archaeological tidbits that place the artifacts in context and help explain their role in the ancient world. The book is a pleasure to look at and a delight to read, and helps bring alive an era that has captured the imagination of the modern world.
Unwrapping the past Certainly not everything in the world is getting better and better, but illustrated books may well be. Color reproduction gets ever more precise and lush, and no book demonstrates this better than what is hands-down the most beautiful book on King Tut…
75 years of painting the town read The journalist Richard Rovere once said of Harold Ross, the founding editor of the New Yorker magazine, that his fundamental contribution to journalism was his fight for the dignity of the printed word.
Read in the context of our own day, when the relentless trivialization of journalism has the dignity of the printed word pretty much down for the count, Rovere’s statement rings with bitter piquancy. All the more so when you consider that the fight wasn’t nearly so desperate in Ross’s time: that brief window when an erudite little Ôcomic paper,’ as Thomas Kunkel said in his biography of Ross five years ago, could be a major cultural force in a way that is unthinkable now. That brief window has long been closed, which is one of the assessments made by Ben Yagoda in About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (Scribner, $27.50, 0684816059), one of a small flurry of books being published to mark this month’s 75th anniversary of the magazine. I have a shelf of books about the New Yorker, from James Thurber’s The Years with Ross of 1958 to Ved Mehta’s paean to William Shawn, Ross’s successor, of 40 years later, and About Town is one I am happy to add to it. It is probably longer than it needs to be, but New Yorker fans eager to absorb every fact, and every opinion about every fact, of the magazine’s history will not find length a defect.
Most of the books on that shelf are biographies or autobiographies or reminiscences. Yagoda has produced something different: a critical and cultural history that looks at the magazine’s content, how it originated and how it evolved, and at the role the magazine has played in American cultural life for three-quarters of a century. His book is the first to be based in large part on the New Yorker archives recently made available by the New York Public Library, which are amazingly voluminous. Imagine coming across a 1949 letter written to the editors by a totally obscure 17-year-old named John Updike.
Like Kunkel and others who have written about the New Yorker, Yagoda gives chief credit for its success in its first two decades to that improbable genius, Ross, and his finicky concern for the clarity of the printed word. Ross’s genius also lay in choosing excellent founding writers and editors, particularly that triumvirate of Thurber, E.B White, and Katherine Angell (later White’s wife). Other blocks in the foundation, according to Yagoda, were that nebulous concept, sophistication ; the focus on New York; the concern with shifting class lines; and, perhaps most important, the cartoons and other art.
In great detail, About Town describes the development of such elements as the Profile and the New Yorker short story and how they have changed. As to the latter, there is somewhat of a paradox. Though Yagoda rightly points out that the magazine’s intense reluctance to stretch has restricted its short-story range, the cumulative effect is of an illustrious fiction record overall.
The author believes the magazine had its golden age in the decade preceding Pearl Harbor a time in its history when it was poised gracefully between the formless and sometimes brittle levity that came before and the unquestionably meritorious, occasionally splendid, but frequently solemn, ponderous, self-important, or dull magazine that stretched from the Second World War on up to the 1980s. He also sees another brief golden age in the 1970s, when it got over solemnizing about the Vietnam War.
So, though he doesn’t use Kunkel’s notion of a brief window of cultural influence that I cited above, Yagoda clearly agrees with it. Aside from a short epilogue taking the magazine up to the present, he ends the book proper in 1987, when Shawn was let go. With that act, the slowly closing window banged shut, and the magazine’s story as a unique and influential institution in our culture ended.
In the first 62 years of its existence, the New Yorker had two visionary editors and was a thing unto itself. In the last 13 it has had three interchangeable editors and grows ever more indistinguishable from Vanity Fair and the rest of that glossy, celebrity-hunting crowd. To those of us who remain fans it is still the best of the lot, but think what that says about how sorry the lot has become. To be fair, think what it says about cultures getting the institutions they deserve.
Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.
75 years of painting the town read The journalist Richard Rovere once said of Harold Ross, the founding editor of the New Yorker magazine, that his fundamental contribution to journalism was his fight for the dignity of the printed word.
Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest, Vegas is also a magnet for the imagination. Inevitably the authors focus on the four-mile stretch of casinos called the Strip, but along the way they address many other aspects of the Industry as Las Vegas residents refer to gambling including entertainment, prostitution, organized crime, and law enforcement.
Let’s move from the narrowest focus to the broadest. Pete Earley, the investigative reporter who wrote The Hot House about Leavenworth, and also published exposes about the Aldrich Ames and John Walker spy cases, has a new book, Super Casino: Inside the New Las Vegas (Bantam, $26.95, 0553095021). He explores everything from legendary Las Vegas promoters such as Bugsy Siegel and Howard Hughes to the astonishing success of recent family-oriented entertainment facilities.
Several of Earley’s stories demonstrate the hypnotic pull the city exerts on residents who try to escape. One security guard tells the story of his experiences during the tragic fire that raged through the MGM Grand Hotel in 1980. Afterward, traumatized, he and his wife moved to Florida to flee the memories, but finally they returned because they missed the twenty-four-hour excitement. Andres Martinez covers some of the same territory from a completely different point of view in 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas. Martinez gave himself a month to lose the $50,000 his publisher had given him to chronicle a gambling spree. Along the way he wrote a vivid, you-are-there account of his adventures, one day per chapter. Like Paul Theroux, Martinez seems part fascinated anthropologist and part happy-go-lucky adventurer. It’s an appealing combination, and makes for a personal take on an impersonal town. Unlike the other Vegas books described here, 24/7 is also extremely amusing.
Inevitably, the most varied of these volumes is an anthology, The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip (Oxford, $30, 0195130707), edited by journalism professor David Littlejohn. Fourteen vivid chapters by as many writers explore such topics as gambling, organized crime, the real estate boom, and locals who decry their home town’s reputation. For example, the chapter Law and Disorder details the countless scam artists who trail the nouveau riche foolish enough to flaunt their wealth. Skin City follows a limo driver who caters to whorehouse clients and acts as surrogate uncle to the prostitutes themselves; then it explores the strip joints of the city.
Broader still in scope is David Thomson’s new book, In Nevada, which bears the ambitious subtitle The Land, the People, God, and Chance (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50, 0679454861). You’ll recognize Thomson’s name from his several previous books, including Rosebud, his biography of Orson Welles, and Beneath Mulholland, a lively tour of Hollywood history. From early nuclear testing to recent theological battles, he prowls his self-assigned turf with scrupulous attention. He refutes those who consider Vegas hell on Earth: Hell is rebuke, torture, and eternal punishment for those who have sinned. Las Vegas may be founded on a paradox, or a trick, but the idea that you will play and strive and then lose is not hellish. For many of us, it’s a profound and absorbing metaphor for life. Thomson mentions that, because he normally writes about film, people couldn’t understand why he was writing about Nevada. If I sometimes seem to concentrate on film, why, really, it’s just a way into life, and words, and wondering what you can believe. For Thomson, as for the authors of these four books, that is precisely what Las Vegas is a way into many other things that seem to converge in the near-mythical city that rises from the desert like a neon mirage.
Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).
Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest,…
Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.
S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest, Vegas is also a magnet for the imagination. Inevitably the authors focus on the four-mile stretch of casinos called the Strip, but along the way they address many other aspects of the Industry as Las Vegas residents refer to gambling including entertainment, prostitution, organized crime, and law enforcement.
Let’s move from the narrowest focus to the broadest. Pete Earley, the investigative reporter who wrote The Hot House about Leavenworth, and also published exposes about the Aldrich Ames and John Walker spy cases, has a new book, Super Casino: Inside the New Las Vegas. He explores everything from legendary Las Vegas promoters such as Bugsy Siegel and Howard Hughes to the astonishing success of recent family-oriented entertainment facilities.
Several of Earley’s stories demonstrate the hypnotic pull the city exerts on residents who try to escape. One security guard tells the story of his experiences during the tragic fire that raged through the MGM Grand Hotel in 1980. Afterward, traumatized, he and his wife moved to Florida to flee the memories, but finally they returned because they missed the twenty-four-hour excitement. Andres Martinez covers some of the same territory from a completely different point of view in 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas (Villard, $25, 0375501819). Martinez gave himself a month to lose the $50,000 his publisher had given him to chronicle a gambling spree. Along the way he wrote a vivid, you-are-there account of his adventures, one day per chapter. Like Paul Theroux, Martinez seems part fascinated anthropologist and part happy-go-lucky adventurer. It’s an appealing combination, and makes for a personal take on an impersonal town. Unlike the other Vegas books described here, 24/7 is also extremely amusing.
Inevitably, the most varied of these volumes is an anthology, The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip (Oxford, $30, 0195130707), edited by journalism professor David Littlejohn. Fourteen vivid chapters by as many writers explore such topics as gambling, organized crime, the real estate boom, and locals who decry their home town’s reputation. For example, the chapter Law and Disorder details the countless scam artists who trail the nouveau riche foolish enough to flaunt their wealth. Skin City follows a limo driver who caters to whorehouse clients and acts as surrogate uncle to the prostitutes themselves; then it explores the strip joints of the city.
Broader still in scope is David Thomson’s new book, In Nevada, which bears the ambitious subtitle The Land, the People, God, and Chance (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50, 0679454861). You’ll recognize Thomson’s name from his several previous books, including Rosebud, his biography of Orson Welles, and Beneath Mulholland, a lively tour of Hollywood history. From early nuclear testing to recent theological battles, he prowls his self-assigned turf with scrupulous attention. He refutes those who consider Vegas hell on Earth: Hell is rebuke, torture, and eternal punishment for those who have sinned. Las Vegas may be founded on a paradox, or a trick, but the idea that you will play and strive and then lose is not hellish. For many of us, it’s a profound and absorbing metaphor for life. Thomson mentions that, because he normally writes about film, people couldn’t understand why he was writing about Nevada. If I sometimes seem to concentrate on film, why, really, it’s just a way into life, and words, and wondering what you can believe. For Thomson, as for the authors of these four books, that is precisely what Las Vegas is a way into many other things that seem to converge in the near-mythical city that rises from the desert like a neon mirage.
Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).
Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.
S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As…
It’s a wonderful life Okay, usually we list only seven, but that’s because we used to be ignorant. Not anymore. The ancient world which includes every continent boasted many noteworthy sites and accomplishments. Dozens of them appear in The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World, edited by Chris Scarre. The subtitle sums it up: The Great Monuments and How They Were Built. This book features lush photos of the ruins as they look now, alongside thoughtful reconstructions of how they appeared in their prime and how they were constructed.
Ancient rock drawings, diagrams, Roman aqueducts, Chinese canals, Incan roads, Herod’s artificial harbor at Caesarea, the giant Nazca drawings in the Peruvian desert they’re all here. From Stonehenge to Easter Island, the tour goes around the world and throughout history even prehistory.
It's a wonderful life Okay, usually we list only seven, but that's because we used to be ignorant. Not anymore. The ancient world which includes every continent boasted many noteworthy sites and accomplishments. Dozens of them appear in The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World,…
So much fiction has been published over the last few decades that any complete catalogue would be gargantuan. And given the tremendous amount of new writing, searching for the worthiest novels is a daunting task. Nevertheless, David Rubel has sifted through the annals of contemporary writing and produced The Reading List, a new reference book listing 110 of the most influential authors of contemporary literary fiction. “Because we didn’t want to sell you a book the size of the Yellow Pages, we had to pick and choose,” Rubel writes. To be included, an author must be alive and still writing, have published more than one book, and have written in more than a single genre. In addition, writers included have all received critical acclaim. No geographical limitations were set, so a wide array of countries are represented by authors like Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Kenzaburo Oe (Japan), and Amos Oz (Israel). In addition to a short biographical summary, the entry for each author includes a complete list of the author’s fiction in chronological order. Books that by consensus are an author’s best are starred, and excerpts from reviews are presented alongside those entries. At the end of each author’s section, Rubel recommends a group of authors of related substance or style. What makes The Reading List stand out from other dry reference tools is Rubel’s unpretentious, informal tone. In one biographical note, for example, he writes, “although his French-sounding name confuses some people, Louis de Bernieres is thoroughly British.” Be advised, however, that the present book makes no mention of Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, or John Grisham. Those and other popular writers are either not sufficiently literary, or are associated too closely with a particular genre. But many other popular writers, like Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and John Irving are listed. And with or without big name writers, Rubel’s list will keep any reader busy for quite a long time. Critics seldom agree about the value of new fiction, and by definition, contemporary writers have yet to stand the test of time. As Rubel notes in his introduction, few readers are likely to be interested in all of the authors presented here. By the same token, just as few readers will come away empty-handed. As a welcome reminder of the wealth of great authors now writing, The Reading List successfully whets the appetite for contemporary literary fiction. Reviewed by Jeremy Caplan.
So much fiction has been published over the last few decades that any complete catalogue would be gargantuan. And given the tremendous amount of new writing, searching for the worthiest novels is a daunting task. Nevertheless, David Rubel has sifted through the annals of contemporary…
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
“Family vacation” takes on a new meaning for grown children without kids of their own—like the couple trying their best to keep both sets of in-laws happy in Weike Wang’s Rental House.
