Informative, racy and fun, but lacks the heft of a serious historical study.
Sassy celebration of the talented dames and gents who invented equal-opportunity Manhattan sophistication.
New Yorker and New York Times contributor and Broadway-musical maven Mordden (Ziegfield: The Man Who Invented Show Business, 2008, etc.) whisks readers through five crucial decades—1920s to ’60s—of New York’s golden era, when cultural refinement began to free itself from the shackles of aristocratic pedigree. The author writes with zesty society-page cattiness about a wide variety of characters, including Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker and other members of the Algonquin Round Table, hedonistic mayor Jimmy Walker, journalist and cultural power broker Walter Winchell, political columnist Dorothy Thompson, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, Irving Berlin, John O’Hara and Truman Capote, among numerous others. The major thematic string tying all these pivotal figures together is Mordden’s concept of “New Yorkism,” which refers to an original multicultural melding of people and ideas—often thanks to gay, Jewish or African-American sources—whose collective exoticism helped make Manhattan into the cultural Mecca by the early to mid-20th century despite Middle America’s distrustful gaze. Mordden also gives ample space to the conservative front that opposed this culturally diverse scene: Neo-Nazi aviator Charles Lindbergh, The Stork Club’s Sherman Billingsley, Elsa Maxwell and others. Unfortunately, because achievement for nonaristocrats required a cutthroat ambition and ruthless self-preservation instinct, many of the author’s main subjects died alienated and alone. The author obviously has a few soft spots for Capote and the lavish Manhattan soirees that gave him the social prominence his own personality couldn’t, yet Mordden never considers the possibility that these indulgent parties eventually ruined Capote as a working writer. Then again, the author is more concerned with the lifestyle these artists and writers created for themselves than with the cultural products associated with their names.
Informative, racy and fun, but lacks the heft of a serious historical study.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-54024-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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