Journalist Merrill (The Blues Route, 1990) records the early days of erstwhile publishing phenom Esquire magazine. Esky, the pop-eyed, mustachioed personification of the periodical, is now mature enough to join AARP and start collecting Social Security, but in his youth he was quite the rakish one. As Merrill tells it, Esquire was launched in 1933 as a journal to sell haberdashery, whiskey, and other gents' furnishings, and it was an instant hit. Its recipe—a mix of equal parts social and sartorial usage, big-name authors and burlesque bawdy—was formulated by owner and publisher David Smart, a Chicago slicker (and publisher of menswear catalogs, including Gentleman's Quarterly) and founding editor Arnold Gingrich. Producing a sort of Police Gazette with snob appeal, Gingrich snared the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Dos Passos, all on the cheap. He placed them cheek by jowl, so to speak, first with the streamlined, airbrushed Petty Girl and then with the even more popular Varga Girl, both prototypical images of impossibly leggy Barbies for Men. RisquÇ cartoons abounded. The formula was unbeatable—so much so that the postal authorities took umbrage and revoked the magazine's mailing privileges. It took the Supreme Court to free the Varga Girl. Merrill tells the Esquire story with wide-ranging aplomb and occasional redundancy. Though he strains a comparison of Tina Brown's editorship of the New Yorker with that of Gingrich at his magazine, it may be fairly surmised that Esky was Eustace Tilley's oversexed first cousin and perhaps a distant ancestor of that rabbit in the tuxedo who has an even more robust libido. (Playboy's Hefner worked at Esquire in his youth, Merrill informs us.) The Varga Girl is now a photograph, and old Esky seems to be celibate, but the elderly rascal in his day provided good reading and mindless ribaldry; and he had an attitude. (b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8135-2165-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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