An illustrated history focuses on the development of American magazines.
Lomazow knows the American magazine industry from extraordinarily deep experience as a collector. Over the course of a “forty-eight-year odyssey,” he has amassed more than 80,000 magazines, dozens of whose covers are gorgeously displayed in this handsome volume. He perspicuously chronicles the historical arc of the American magazine, beginning with its genesis in the 18th century in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City and continuing through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution to its present iterations. The author covers a dizzying swath of territory with remarkable concision, including magazines devoted to literary pursuits, trade, social activism, business, and fashion. The rich historical account that emerges often assumes a quirkily unconventional take—for example, when covering the golden age of magazines (1890 to 1920), Lomazow concentrates on the neglected story of the great proliferation of smaller-market publications: “The era also witnessed the birth of another new magazine genre of cultural importance: the little magazine, a form associated with artistic experimentalism, avant-gardism, and social and political activism.” In fact, while the first half of the book is devoted to a synoptic history, the second half mines the cosmos of these little magazines and the impact they had despite a more limited reach than their better known, mass-market counterparts. The author’s effort doubles as an exhibition catalog—he presented his collection at the Grolier Club in New York City—and a sweeping history, both of which are executed with elegance and intelligence.
Lomazow’s expertise on the subject is inarguably magisterial—he seems equally self-assured opining on the biggest and smallest publications, the shifting sands of copyright law, and the ramifications of the birth of the internet. And since one could hardly furnish a history of the American magazine without some reflection on the circumstances—social, cultural, and political—of its evolution, the work is a wonderfully unusual account of the country’s growth as a whole. Magazines, especially the smaller ones that sometimes remained obscure, embodied the hopes of a nation of readers looking for edification, solidarity, or beauty: “While fast becoming a consumer-oriented nation embracing commercial mass market culture, America was also culturally aspirational. The little magazines serve as a demonstration of how the American entrepreneurial spirit was harnessed in the service of high culture and social progressivism.” While it’s more common to find histories that emphasize the country’s famous commercial spirit and indefatigable productivity, the author illuminates America’s cultural longings with impressive astuteness. In addition, an exhibition catalog is rightly judged by its visual splendor, and on this score, Lomazow deserves kudos—the book is adorned with dozens of stunning photographs, some immediately recognizable as iconic and others tantalizingly esoteric and rare. This is a remarkable history—thoughtful, granularly meticulous, and comprehensive—as well as a visually spectacular showpiece. One needn’t be a magazine collector to thoroughly enjoy this refreshingly original overview of American history.
A delightful combination of historical commentary and beautiful photos.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60583-091-9
Page Count: 337
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HISTORY | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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