Entertaining if sometimes mean-spirited and full of valuable lessons in how—and sometimes how not—to run a magazine.
Princess Diana, Donald Trump, Nancy Reagan, and other newsy icons come in for critical assessment by a sharp-tongued London transplant who remade two leading magazines.
Brown (The Diana Chronicles, 2007) arrived in New York in 1983, in the thick of the Reagan era, and set about revamping a magazine that was off just about anyone’s radar. Recruited by Si Newhouse, a tycoon of a literary bent (“Si doesn’t know what the fuck is going on on the VF floor,” she writes, a tad unappreciatively), she did just that, filling the magazine with serious journalism while chasing after the pop-culture evanescent. This diary is a blend of high and low and in between, especially on the high gossip front, as with her fixation on a certain cluster of royals: “No one is more dismayed about this apparently than Diana, who signed up to marry the royal James Bond.” Amid the fluff and the constant fretting about money—possessed of a healthy sense of self-regard, Brown is also keenly attuned to matters of dollars and pence—readers learn a lot about how a high-toned magazine is put together, work involving schmoozing, partying, and ego-stroking as much as blue-penciling, all of which Brown is clearly very good at. A typical day, she reveals, might involving talking a recalcitrant author into a piece he or she might not really have wanted to do, dealing with one’s handlers (“How does two million dollars sound to you?” says superagent Swifty Lazar, shopping a novel by Brown that exists only in the ether), and slotting the David Nivens and the Ahmet Erteguns in for supper. The narrative ends with an upward move to another Newhouse property, the New Yorker, where, as at VF, Brown upset dozens of boats (“I replaced seventy-one of the 120 New Yorker staff with fifty outstanding new talents”) while casting a cultural institution in her own image.
Entertaining if sometimes mean-spirited and full of valuable lessons in how—and sometimes how not—to run a magazine.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-136-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.
A fresh, urbane history of the dramatic and melodramatic belle epoque.
When Barnes (The Only Story, 2018, etc.), winner of the Man Booker Prize and many other literary awards, first saw John Singer Sargent’s striking portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzi—handsome, “virile, yet slender,” dressed in a sumptuous scarlet coat—he was intrigued by a figure he had not yet encountered in his readings about 19th-century France. The wall label revealed that Pozzi was a gynecologist; a magazine article called him “not only the father of French gynecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients.” The paradox of healer and exploiter posed an alluring mystery that Barnes was eager to investigate. Pozzi, he discovered, succeeded in his amorous affairs as much as in his acclaimed career. “I have never met a man as seductive as Pozzi,” the arrogant Count Robert de Montesquiou recalled; Pozzi was a “man of rare good sense and rare good taste,” “filled with knowledge and purpose” as well as “grace and charm.” The author’s portrait, as admiring as Sargent’s, depicts a “hospitable, generous” man, “rich by marriage, clubbable, inquisitive, cultured and well travelled,” and brilliant. The cosmopolitan Pozzi, his supercilious friend Montesquiou, and “gentle, whimsical” Edmond de Polignac are central characters in Barnes’ irreverent, gossipy, sparkling history of the belle epoque, “a time of vast wealth for the wealthy, of social power for the aristocracy, of uncontrolled and intricate snobbery, of headlong colonial ambition, of artistic patronage, and of duels whose scale of violence often reflected personal irascibility more than offended honor.” Dueling, writes the author, “was not just the highest form of sport, it also required the highest form of manliness.” Barnes peoples his history with a spirited cast of characters, including Sargent and Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt (who adored Pozzi), Henry James and Proust, Pozzi’s diarist daughter, Catherine, and unhappy wife, Therese, and scores more.
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65877-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.
One of history’s most prolific inventors receives his due from one of the world’s greatest biographers.
Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Morris (This Living Hand and Other Essays, 2012, etc.), who died this year, agrees that Thomas Edison (1847-1931) almost certainly said, “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” and few readers of this outstanding biography will doubt that he was the quintessential workaholic. Raised in a middle-class Michigan family, Edison displayed an obsessive entrepreneurial spirit from childhood. As an adolescent, he ran a thriving business selling food and newspapers on a local railroad. Learning Morse code, he spent the Civil War as a telegrapher, impressing colleagues with his speed and superiors with his ability to improve the equipment. In 1870, he opened his own shop to produce inventions to order. By 1876, he had money to build a large laboratory in New Jersey, possibly the world’s first industrial research facility. Never a loner, Edison hired talented people to assist him. The dazzling results included the first commercially successful light bulb for which, Morris reminds readers, he invented the entire system: dynamo, wires, transformers, connections, and switches. Critics proclaim that Edison’s innovations (motion pictures, fluoroscope, rechargeable batteries, mimeograph, etc.) were merely improvements on others’ work, but this is mostly a matter of sour grapes. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was a clunky, short-range device until it added Edison’s carbon microphone. And his phonograph flabbergasted everyone. Humans had been making images long before Daguerre, but no one had ever reproduced sound. Morris rivetingly describes the personalities, business details, and practical uses of Edison’s inventions as well as the massive technical details of years of research and trial and error for both his triumphs and his failures. For no obvious reason, the author writes in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1920, with each of the seven following chapters backtracking a decade. It may not satisfy all readers, but it works.
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9311-0
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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