The country’s oldest weekly magazine, a fixture of liberal households since the Civil War, has a dirty secret, its long-time editor/publisher discloses. It loses money.
But then, writes Navasky (Naming Names, the 1982 National Book Award winner), so does National Review, and so does just about every other journal of opinion published here. Indeed, The Nation has always lost money. So why go on publishing so poor a business prospect? Navasky’s answer is a spirited defense of the independent press, one that incidentally addresses why nonprofit status is a bad thing overall. In this elegant book—a combination memoir, intellectual history, and how-to guide for would-be magazine publishers—he allows that the thrill of chasing news and potential donors alike has been quite enough to keep his heart in the game for the last quarter-century, tough as that game is. Too tough for the executives at Disney, at least, who have been threatening to shut down ABC’s Nightline as irrelevant: “If relevance is measured by the bottom line,” Navasky writes, “they are right. I was glad to be in the un-mass media.” Navasky cheerfully predicts that its audience will grow with the follies of the Bush administration: “If it’s bad for the country, it’s good for The Nation.” (He adds: “But even I would have a qualm or two if I thought that The Nation’s business future depended on an imperial America’s unilateral aggression abroad and suppression of civil liberties at home.”) When he’s not covering the practicalities of publishing—and this is worth any five textbooks on the subject—Navasky ponders the odd house he heads, famously and oddly divided, with columnists feuding among themselves (Christopher Hitchens vs. Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens vs. The Left in re Iraq, and so forth) and left stalwarts like the late Susan Sontag calling it to task for lapses in political correctness. And all the while the right, of course, brands it a bastion of Bolshevism. It’s politics as usual, in other words, lively and always surprising.
A pleasure for general readers, and a blessing for students of the independent media and contemporary letters.Pub Date: May 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-29997-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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